There is immense pressure on marketers and agencies to compile creative briefs that deliver positive returns on investment. Furthermore, presenting impactful and effective work that describes their products and pointers is essential.
Carl Witton, Chief Growth Officer at Tangram explains how to create inspired and creative briefs to improve your success rates.
What is a Brief
Creative briefs are documents marketers and agencies use to convey the strategies of creative projects. However, inspired creative briefs do a lot more, outlining project purposes, specific requirements, goals, messaging, demographics, and other important information.
Creative briefs usually develop in the initiation phase of the project. However, it is imperative for the creative team to understand the project from the get-go. Therefore, it should be presented to clients and key stakeholders as early as possible. However, there is no point in including all the relevant information if the structure of the brief means that no one reads it.
"Writing bad briefs is the most expensive way to write advertising."
There is a reality gap between what brands think they send out and what they actually send out. Approximately 80% of agencies believe that marketers simply don’t understand what they require from a brief. Moreover, as budgetary requirements get tightened, poor-quality briefs are having a damaging effect on brands.
A study by Australian strategists Matt Davies and Pieter-Paul von Weiler and research partner Flood + Partners found that 80% of marketers think they’re good at writing briefs, while only 10% of creative agencies agree.
"Simply said, lack of communication. Agencies don't push back on marketing briefs that lack strategy, objectives or are filled with a language they don't understand. However, they don't flag with their clients what's missing or unclear. Marketers assume their briefs are clear because there isn't a productive conversation being had between them and their agency that clarifies their marketing brief."
Inspired Creative Briefs Do So Much More
While creative briefs all share the same basic layout, they can differ tremendously in what they convey. Furthermore, some projects will need more planning, so a one size fits all approach is pointless. This is where WorkBook & ConceptShare come in. Electronic creative briefs are fully customizable, enabling you to design them to cover the information necessary for that specific type of project.
It’s essential to ask the right questions; it will make your life so much easier. In essence, you must clarify the deliverable’s who, what, where, when, and how.
Use Effective Templates for Your Briefs
It is vital that your brief conveys all the information that you have about the brand and its specific desires. It should be succinct in its delivery and easily fit onto one page. Always ensure that you have prepared correctly. The briefing stage should play a vital role in bridging your strategy and your execution.
Be brutal in editing your ideas down to a strategic objective. All it needs is a finely tuned consumer target, the correct customer response, one clear message, and two reasons to believe in your presentation. In addition, your creative briefs should flow to the reader. Unnecessary lines will jar, and the reader will lose interest.
Briefing templates in WorkBook
A high-quality project management tool should automatically populate new projects based on type. Or at the very least, copy to the project after its creation. For example, Deltek WorkBook allows the project manager to take either of these approaches. You can create brief templates that meet your business needs with ease. The brief feature allows you to apply pre-defined field values which will automatically populate when you create a new brief.
It is simple to create templates for projects based on the type of project work, office location, or the organization responsible for the job. Project templates can be set up as part of WorkBook’s configuration. Once created, briefs can be assigned to jobs or tasks. Additionally, you can assign approvers, add attachments, and conversations to the brief. Keeping all the valuable information in one place.
Summary
You cannot overstate the importance of writing exciting and inspiring creative briefs. Getting things right at the beginning of an approach increases the chances of getting that all-important return on investment. Create a story, use humor and take a light-hearted approach. A boring brief suggests a boring product. By keeping the target interested, your following approach is made a lot easier.
Adopt good software like WorkBook, and you will soon be writing creative briefs that stand out from the crowd.
