Welcome to Marketing Chronicles. A newsletter where marketers come for expert industry commentary at the intersection of strategy and creativity — every Wednesday sent before daybreak. If you like what you see, join us for free.

In this edition:

• Column: How To Write Effective Creative Briefs

• Inspiration: Barilla’s “Ticket To Togetherness”

• Lateral Thinking: Peter Worley’s “The Funnel of Righteousness”

Column: How To Write Effective Creative Briefs

Briefs have long played a central role in everything agencies do.

Need a new website? Where’s the web brief.

Need a rebrand? Brief me on it.

A new campaign? Show me the creative brief.

This is the fundamental document that serves as the jumping off point for all tactical initiatives. It ensures that whatever follows it is grounded on a solid strategic foundations centered around key objectives that must be achieved.

When poorly written or bypassed, agencies are at the mercy of hope to deliver results.

How Briefs Are Used

In the process of developing advertising there are 3 customers involved:

• The consumer

• The client

• The creative team

Oftentimes, briefs are written with only the first two customers in mind — we want to please the client and ensure that whatever we create will resonate with the end consumer.

However, strategists — the authors of creative briefs —, have another customer to serve: their creative partners.

While briefs are thrown out after advertising is created — and at times not strictly followed —, these dense strategic documents serve as an “anchor to the mind” when coming up with ideas.

So, in a way, creative is developed from the brief, and not to the brief.

This document is the start of a conversation, which is captured in 1-3 pages, and is communicated to the creative team through a briefing — which is different than a brief (refer to this article I previously wrote on this critical distinction).

When writing a brief, all of the strategic thinking that was done by the planner must be communicated in a simple and devoid of excesses narrative that sets the direction for the advertisement.

When Charlie Robertson interviewed a series of creatives for the book “How To Plan Advertising”, the common desire they had in regards to briefs were:

• Turn the prosaic into the interesting

• Commit to a point of view

• Produce something simple, interesting, open

• Be single-minded but not too restricting.

Then he goes on to quote this insightful passage from Karl Popper's autobiography:

“What characterizes "creative thinking", apart from the intensity of interest in the problem, seems to me often the ability to break through the limits of the range — or to vary the range from which the less creative thinker selects his trials (of possible solutions to a problem). It is often the result of a culture clash, that is a clash between ideas, or frameworks of ideas. Such a clash may help us break through the ordinary bounds of our imagination.... But it seems to me that what is essential to "creative" or "inventive" thinking is a combination of intense interest in some problem (and a readiness to try again and again) with highly critical thinking.” — Unended Quest (K.Popper, 1992)

Quite an interesting take that captures the purpose strategic thinking in creative endeavors. So long as you keep in mind that you’re aiming to arrive at a well-reasoned dialogue, briefs should really mean greater creative freedom to play within known strategic bounds.

What Should Go In The Brief

Each agency will typically add their own spin to their briefs and emphasize one section over another depending on their internal advertising philosophy, but in general the below questions should be answered in the document:

• Why are we advertising at all; what are the objectives; what is advertising’s role?

• Who is the advertising aiming to influence?

• What do you wish to communicate about this brand?

• Why do you think those it is aimed at will believe it?

• How do you wish to say it, what tone of voice?

• What do you think they will say having received this communication?

• What are you not allowed to convey about this product, or must be communicated legally within paid-for communications?

That’s really it. You might see briefs slicing the above in varying ways, but they must somehow address these key questions.

For example, I’ve recently seen a brief that covered the above in 13 questions:

1. What is your communication objective? What are we trying to accomplish?

2. Who is the primary target? And what do we know about them?

3. What is the current behaviour/perception that we are trying to change?

4. What is the barrier (i.e. what is standing in the way of them taking the action we want them to take)?

5. What do we want them to believe/do as a result of this work?

6. What is the key benefit we offer consumers? Why will they care?

7. What RTBs (reasons to believe) do we have to support this?

8. What are the expected deliverables?

9. What is the budget we have to work with?

10. How will we measure success?

11. What are our priority markets, and why?

12. What are the mandatories (i.e. taglines, specs, legal lines, etc.)?

13. What is the precise timing of the offer and desired in-market date?

While not all agencies ask their strategists to write down some initial concept ideas, I recommend that they at least attempt to answer the brief. If the person writing it is struggling to come up with anything from it, one can’t expect that the creative team will be able to do so either.

It is also recommended to bring creatives into the fold earlier in the process than just at the briefing meeting itself. This ensures stronger buy-in from the start and enables the strategist to expand their thinking before deciding on a set direction for the project.

Tips On Writing Effective Briefs

While the above sounds simple and straight forward, there are a series of potential slippery corners that can send you off a metaphorical strategic cliff.

Plain Language

For starters, because planners spend weeks immersed in research, it can be easy to write and communicate briefs with jargon that no one understands. Conveying ideas clearly and simply should remain top of mind for all brief writers.

Here’s how Jon Steel once communicated the overall benefit of a highly intricate camera they were advertising for to his creatives:

“The powerful zoom lens allows you to spot a bee’s balls from ten paces. And the x-thousand-pixel CCD imager gives you a picture so sharp that you can’t just see his balls, you can count the number of hairs on them.”

Sounds silly, but he made a highly technical feature interesting to learn about. And that’s what I mean by keeping your creative team in mind as that “3rd customer” in the process.

Pick A Lane

Much of a planner’s job involved establishing a coherent point of view for the agency.

But since strategists spend so much time reading research, conducting research, thinking about the problem, etc. it can be easy to see validity in several points of view. And that’s totally ok and a good sign of open-mindedness.

However, for the purposes of developing advertising strategy, it’s imperative that the planner develops a point of view about the problem at hand — that doesn’t necessarily mean picking a POV, but it could be creating one.

When the creative team starts spotting contradictions in the brief (i.e. the brand aims to be traditional yet modern), confusion begins to form like a cloud overtop the project team.

Pick a lane, develop a coherent argument to defend it, and inspire your team to believe in it. That’s strategic thinking 101.

Be Realistic

When developing a POV, it can be easy to fall into another trap: wishful thinking.

While clients can be pardoned for loving their product too much (in the end of the day, they live and breath it, and it pays for bills!), an agency partner should never drinking from the cool-aid.

As advertising planners, we must have a good grasp of reality. If the the research shows that the product has flaws, we must point them out to the creative team. This not only prevents creatives from chasing a pipe dream, but it can actually equip them to turn the challenge on its head and spin it into an interesting creative concept.

It’s one thing to internally believe that our brand of mayonnaise is saving the rain forest (though that’s still a problem) — it’s another to try to convince our consumers of it.

Leave the blue sky thinking to creatives. The strategy must be rooted in reality.

The Job Is Not Done

Once the strategy has been developed, a brief has been written, and the creative team has been briefed on it, the job is still not done.

As strategists it should come as a compliment when creatives come back with more questions afterwards. This shows that you’ve send them in your intended direction and that now they’re contemplating possibilities that you’ve left open-ended in the brief.

Remaining a part of the creative process not only enables the creatives to bounce ideas off of a subject matter expert in the brand, but it can also spark changes to the brief.

Remember, a brief is not an end in itself, it’s a means to it. So, when creatives begin doing their magic and poking and prodding at the brief, they might uncover things you haven’t thought of.

Being there as a strategic mind to help evaluate new directions can oftentimes lead to a richer territory than originally intended. But that could not be done without the collaboration between the creatives and the strategist.

If you are looking to read some of the great creative briefs written in the past, check out this resource. Enjoy!

Inspiration: Barilla’s “Ticket To Togetherness”

Today, it’s quite common for people to eat alone. Whether that’s a consequence of busier work lives or mobile phones that enable us to watch YouTube and Netflix from anywhere, this sacred human ritual of sharing a meal together is sadly becoming a thing from the past.

To shine light on this fact, Barilla took advantage of World Pasta Day to give away free boxes of spaghetti for people to cook and eat with their loved ones.

They set up shop near a subway station, and leveraged their packaging as a ticket to enter the subway.

It was a simple activation that had this added dimension of turning the product into an interactive IRL tool.

This is a reminder that marketers should have ALL 4Ps at their disposal to activate against.

Lateral Thinking: Peter Worley’s “The Funnel of Righteousness”

This past week I was reading the Philosophy Now magazine and came across this wonderful article by Peter Worley.

In it he breaks down the various degrees of “being right” — because while two answers to a question could be correct, one might be more correct than the other. Let me explain.

Pretend you’re a middle school teacher and you ask your students “what is the answer to 2+2?”.

Alison says, “22”. Belinda says, “4”. Who’s right?

As Peter describes, “Now imagine that Alison’s reason for her answer is “Because if you add the digit ‘2’ to another digit ‘2’, you get ‘22’”, while Belinda’s reason is, “Because 4 is my favourite number.” How does this affect your assessment of who’s right? There are some who would say that Belinda is right, even though her reasoning is wrong.”

It’s a fantastic short read that will open up your mind to assessing the validity of “right answers”.

More of PPA:

• 🤝 Connect with Pedro on LinkedIn and/or X

• 💌 In case you missed it:

  • How To Make Your Brand Look Like Itself

  • When Your Brand Needs Some Dusting Off

  • How To Grow Small Brands

PPA 

Pedro Porto Alegre is a seasoned marketing professional with in-depth experience building brand and communications strategies for top-tier B2C and B2B organizations across Canada. His repertoire extends from crafting and executing integrated multi-media brand marketing campaigns to the commercialization of performance-driven innovations for multimillion-dollar and nascent brands alike.