The Art of Client Service

Chapter 23What Makes a Brilliant Brief?

If you're a copywriter, you are likely known for the television, radio, print, digital, and other content you create. You are a writer of commercials.

If you're an account person, you are known for the conference reports, presentations, and scopes of work you create. You are not a writer of commercials; you are a commercial writer, with these items the product of your commerce. And as a commercial writer, one of the products of your commerce is the formulation of creative briefs.

Now, lots of agencies have Planning people who lay claim to the creative brief, and this is fair, but this does not relieve you of responsibility. You still need to assert your role as a full and contributing partner to its formulation.

If you work in an agency without a Planning department, chances are creating creative briefs lives in your domain, and presents one of the invigorating challenges of your career. If the brief is right, the advertising likely will be right. If the brief is wrong, chances are the advertising will be wrong.

As I wrote earlier, there are as many approaches to creative briefs as there are agencies, but even so, there are four things that should guide you in your efforts:

1. It needs to be short. Reread Chapter 22 and follow its advice. To recap: a brief that goes on for page after page is nearly useless. Your job is to sort through what's helpful and what's not, keeping the former, discarding the latter. The result is a brief that should ...