I've been on the receiving end of hundreds of creative briefs. Some are excellent – they give us everything we need to do our best work without wasting time on the wrong direction. Most are not. Not because the marketing leaders writing them aren't smart, but because most people have never been explicitly taught what makes a brief work.
Here are three things that would make the average agency brief dramatically more effective – and therefore produce dramatically better work in less time.
The most common briefing mistake is describing what you want rather than why you want it. 'We need a brochure' is a deliverable. It tells us almost nothing useful about the creative problem we need to solve.
Compare that to: 'We're losing deals at the proposal stage because prospects don't understand how our service is different from the three competitors they're also evaluating. We need something that makes our differentiation unmistakably clear in the 60 seconds before they open the proposal.'
That's a business problem. And it gives the creative team the context to make genuinely good decisions about what the brochure should do, how it should be structured, and what it needs to achieve before any design work begins.
The rule: before writing the deliverable, write one sentence that starts with 'We have a problem because...' That sentence is the most important line in the brief.
Reference boards are a standard part of the creative process –clients share examples of work they find interesting or inspiring, and the creative team uses those to calibrate the direction. This is useful.
But almost as useful – and much less commonly shared – is the negative reference. What have you seen that you definitively don't want? What aesthetic direction would your CEO immediately reject? What tone of voice would undermine your brand?
Knowing what to avoid is equally important to knowing what to pursue. And it often reveals things about the brand that don't come out through positive references: the company that loves bold creative in theory but has a CEO who always pulls things back to conservative; the team that says they want to be disruptive but consistently approves the safe option.
Negative references accelerate alignment and reduce the chance of presenting a direction that was never going to get approved.
Deadlines get padded for understandable reasons: there's buffer built in for internal review, for stakeholder feedback, for unexpected changes. The brief says 'end of month' and the real need-date is the 15th.
This padding creates a problem. The agency plans to the stated deadline. Work gets delivered on the 30th. The internal review takes a week. The actual launch is now two weeks behind where it needed to be.
Tell us the real date – including the internal review dates you're working backwards from. We can plan to a real deadline. We can't plan to the discovered one.
A good creative agency would rather know a tight deadline on day one than discover it on day 14. We can usually accommodate tight timelines if we know about them upfront. We can't accommodate them when they're revealed mid-project.
Time spent on a brief is not administrative overhead. It's a creative investment that pays back many times over in reduced revisions, better strategic direction, and faster delivery.
The best clients I've worked with treat the brief as a creative document in its own right – something worth doing properly, not something to get through quickly so the 'real work' can begin. Because the brief is the real work. Everything after it is execution.
Working on a creative brief and want a second set of eyes? DM us – we're happy to give feedback before the project starts.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
At ID8 Creative, we work with B2B and tech companies specifically - MSPs, SaaS companies, IT service providers, and consulting agencies on exactly this. Not decoration. Commercial creative that drives results.
I've been on the receiving end of hundreds of creative briefs. Some are excellent – they give us everything we need to do our best work without wasting time on the wrong direction. Most are not. Not because the marketing leaders writing them aren't smart, but because most people have never been explicitly taught what makes a brief work.
Here are three things that would make the average agency brief dramatically more effective – and therefore produce dramatically better work in less time.
The most common briefing mistake is describing what you want rather than why you want it. 'We need a brochure' is a deliverable. It tells us almost nothing useful about the creative problem we need to solve.
Compare that to: 'We're losing deals at the proposal stage because prospects don't understand how our service is different from the three competitors they're also evaluating. We need something that makes our differentiation unmistakably clear in the 60 seconds before they open the proposal.'
That's a business problem. And it gives the creative team the context to make genuinely good decisions about what the brochure should do, how it should be structured, and what it needs to achieve before any design work begins.
The rule: before writing the deliverable, write one sentence that starts with 'We have a problem because...' That sentence is the most important line in the brief.
Reference boards are a standard part of the creative process –clients share examples of work they find interesting or inspiring, and the creative team uses those to calibrate the direction. This is useful.
But almost as useful – and much less commonly shared – is the negative reference. What have you seen that you definitively don't want? What aesthetic direction would your CEO immediately reject? What tone of voice would undermine your brand?
Knowing what to avoid is equally important to knowing what to pursue. And it often reveals things about the brand that don't come out through positive references: the company that loves bold creative in theory but has a CEO who always pulls things back to conservative; the team that says they want to be disruptive but consistently approves the safe option.
Negative references accelerate alignment and reduce the chance of presenting a direction that was never going to get approved.
Deadlines get padded for understandable reasons: there's buffer built in for internal review, for stakeholder feedback, for unexpected changes. The brief says 'end of month' and the real need-date is the 15th.
This padding creates a problem. The agency plans to the stated deadline. Work gets delivered on the 30th. The internal review takes a week. The actual launch is now two weeks behind where it needed to be.
Tell us the real date – including the internal review dates you're working backwards from. We can plan to a real deadline. We can't plan to the discovered one.
A good creative agency would rather know a tight deadline on day one than discover it on day 14. We can usually accommodate tight timelines if we know about them upfront. We can't accommodate them when they're revealed mid-project.
Time spent on a brief is not administrative overhead. It's a creative investment that pays back many times over in reduced revisions, better strategic direction, and faster delivery.
The best clients I've worked with treat the brief as a creative document in its own right – something worth doing properly, not something to get through quickly so the 'real work' can begin. Because the brief is the real work. Everything after it is execution.
Working on a creative brief and want a second set of eyes? DM us – we're happy to give feedback before the project starts.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
At ID8 Creative, we work with B2B and tech companies specifically - MSPs, SaaS companies, IT service providers, and consulting agencies on exactly this. Not decoration. Commercial creative that drives results.
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