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5 QUALITIES OF A GOOD BRIEF FOR YOUR AGENCY

Agence Puck 28 June 2022

The brief is an art. And like any art or craft, it can be learned and practised. In some large companies, armies of young graduates spend years learning to write a good brief, and rewrite it 20 times if necessary. Why? Because the expected result will always depend on the quality of the brief.

So what are the qualities of a good brief?

1. Restraint – there's no point in producing dozens of slides on the company's history; only the information needed to understand the context and where you want to go is necessary. A good brief should fit on one page. You can then attach information about a product's functional benefits so that it can be used for adaptations.

2. Clarity – a brief must be understandable by anyone. This is an essential point, so test it on those close to you. You're not briefing engineers but creatives. A good brief must therefore ban jargon. This is especially true in a BtoB field.

3. Commitment – whoever writes the brief must commit, take a stance, interpret reality and choose rigorously, for example by choosing a USP (unique selling proposition). This is the key sales argument. There aren't 10 of them; indeed, you can't say “USPs” as I often see. There is one (chosen), which can be the synthesis of several ideas, such as “concentrated technology in a 10mm thickness”. Commitment must apply to every point of the brief. It also involves the decision-maker who will judge and approve the result, because afterwards there's nothing more counterproductive than telling the agency: oh no, that's not possible, but we didn't tell you…?

4. Singularity – a brief based on the market's generic expectations serves no purpose. It's your product or service that has to be promoted, so find what's specific about you in the market. You are the experts.

5. Motivation – for goodness' sake, put some spirit into it! You are addressing creatives, so stimulate their desire to give their best. Always remember that a good creative has already responded to thousands of briefs and hundreds of advertisers. They have already experienced the advertiser/agency relationship a hundred times more than you have. They are experts in it, which is the big difference between advertisers and agencies on this subject.

Details

Remember, a brief is a springboard: it says “where do we want to go?”, not how to get there. For example, if your technology is “best able to decontaminate equipment”, the creative might respond by saying “our technology was chosen by the Paris public hospitals at the height of the coronavirus epidemic” or “our solution uses active ingredients twice as powerful as standard medical solutions”.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty of the brief: the form

Now that we've been through the qualities of a good brief, scan each of the following steps with these criteria:

Reason

Why are we writing this brief? What are our objectives and the reasons for our actions?

Context

How to understand the market and its ins and outs.

Market diagnosis

Make choices and set out your strategy against your competitors and the place you want to occupy.

Target

Commit to the type of behaviour or individuals you want to address as a priority. In fact, this isn't a marketing or sales target, but the way you address this population will send signals to others. For example, for years Free was the brand for geeks, real ones, and addressed them in its communication, but this target is small. So who were the customers who came to it? Those who dream of being geeks.

You can add a corollary to this point: the “insight”, in other words the state of mind of the people you're addressing.

Benefit or promise

You have 2 ways of approaching the subject, like two facets of the same idea or the same result.

What benefit do you imagine your future customer will gain from your offer? Or what promise will you make to them so that they hold this opinion?

Proof

To support such a message, you need to provide proof of the promise you are making or of the benefit your future customer will gain from it.

Personality or tone

Don't hesitate to give your briefs a human touch. This isn't about style constraints such as “we don't want humour”, but rather something like: our company wants to emphasise its empathy with its customers.

Constraints

This is where you set your limits. Don't impose too many constraints on style or form: I could show you hundreds of cases where this type of constraint was dropped when faced with a creative idea. No, here we're talking about technical, legal or cultural constraints. Tell the agency, for example, that care will be needed with the symbols or images used in a particular type of market.

Final essential tips

Practise by rewriting the briefs of major advertising or marketing actions (Apple, Evian, LVMH, Airbus, etc.) as you look at them. That's how you learn.

A brief is iterative and shared, but not disorganised. Take the time to debate a brief you have worked on for hours with your management and your agency, and be confident: if you've worked on it for hours, you know more about the argument than they do, and you could be an important source of skill, analysis and argument for your company.