Strategy, Creative and Production Briefs

Hire me to improve your most important documents—the ones that drive growth.

I received my first creative brief in 1992. I authored my first in 1995. Since then I’ve experienced hundreds of briefs in numerous forms—from strategy to creative to production—for brands including Volkswagen, 3M, Porsche, Skippy Peanut Butter, PwC, Land O’Lakes, Ford Motor Co., Jennie-O Turkey and MetLife. I can help improve your briefing methodology and outcomes.

I’ve done several interviews on the process and practice of creative briefing.

✅ The Agency Management Institute’s “Build a Better Agency” podcast provided a thorough breakdown of key themes from our interview.

✅ “The Brief Bros.” (Howard and Henry) and I talked at length in this YouTube interview about best practices for creative briefing.

🔎 Perspectives

Here are four blog posts written to help you think about briefing inputs and process, briefing roles, politics and expectations as they relate to Strategic, Creative and Production briefs.

🔬 Definitions

In the world of marketing, design, digital and advertising there are typically three kinds of briefs: Strategy, Creative and a Production. Each has its own traditions, methodologies and objectives.

🤔 THE STRATEGY BRIEF

You might need to align teams around brand or business objectives—quite literally, “are we on the same page?” In this case, the Strategy Brief acts more like a memo, outlining and hopefully instilling enthusiasm for specific, unified direction. In this use, the word “brief” literally means “succinct,” “short,” “to the point.” This is the document marketers and agencies can develop together, and use to create alignment.

As I’ve written:

Broadly speaking, strategy is about setting context, defining definitions, asserting rules, revealing insights, initiating way-finding and ultimately architecting How That Thing We Want to Occur Can Occur. Strategy is a kind of verb; it is a kind of do-ing.

Key elements of a Strategy Brief can include:

• Business Issues

• Competitive/Industry Insights

• SWOT Analysis

• Audience Motivation/Insight

• Resource Constraints/Manditories

• Objectives/SMART Goals

The simplest form of a Strategy Brief is two questions:

1. Who’s It For?

2. What’s It For?

And “It” refers to the strategic impact or result.

🎨 THE CREATIVE BRIEF

This is a different kettle of fish. It is a starting point on a journey. It doesn’t tell so much as ask. The purpose of a Creative Brief is to elicit remarkable creative output—ideas, headlines, designs, campaigns, concepts. I believe the most effective Creative Briefs do two things really well: They inform and they inflame. And in all candor, there really isn’t a moment in business quite like a creative briefing.

I’m in the camp which believes a Creative Brief is an agency-internal document. It’s written for a specific creative audience. If the broader team needs something to review and align around, I suggest a Strategy Brief. Here in 2023 the modern Creative Brief can take many forms, hopefully all concise and illuminating. Key elements of a Creative Brief include:

• WHY (are we advertising?); WHAT (are we selling?); WHO (are we trying to persuade?); WHEN/WHERE (will our influence occur?); and HOW MUCH (resource is at our command?)

• Describe THE MOST SALIENT BEHAVIOR related to this opportunity

• Given the Internet, THEN WHAT? What do we want the audience to do after encountering our work? In other words, what’s the Call To Action (CTA)?

Time spent honing a brief is better than time spent reworking creativity. To that end, I’m a huge fan of the following creative briefing framework. A creative brief can be as simple 😬 as these three subjects—GET, TO, BY:

GET (the Audience) i.e. Get evocatively described roles/personalities/tribes

TO (a Behavior) i.e. To adjust/adopt/begin/stop specific behavior related to the business issue (and given all the data tools, try and describe a behavior which can be measured and attributable)

BY (a Motivating Insight) i.e. By dramatizing/revealing/illuminating, etc. an inspiring perception (or epiphany) related to either the Audience, the Behavior or the Business Issue

BTW, writing a truly motivating, world-changing creative brief is really hard. Plan your resources accordingly.

🎬 THE PRODUCTION BRIEF

Here’s a second document marketers and agency teams can and should align around. A Production Brief exists after everyone’s arrived at an idea worth producing. You wouldn’t draft a Production Brief without a known, approved idea. This kind of brief is meant to quickly enable new parties to get up to speed in support of producing whatever needs producing.

A Production Brief is a kind of utility document. It synthesizes aspects if the Strategy Brief, Creative Brief and the idea we’re centered around. It is often very focused on timelines, coordination and other aspects of project management. The objective of a Production Brief is getting the work done on time, crafted appropriately, and to the satisfaction of all parties. It contains whatever information will best, and most efficiently, inform that effort. Key elements of a Production Brief typically include:

• The Core Idea (and examples of approved direction)

• Comms/Media Planning, i.e. Schedules, Deliverables, Specs

• Production Budgets

• Business Issues - relevant to production

• Audience Motivation/Insight, i.e. The Most Salient Behavior

• Resource Constraints/Manditories, i.e. Legal, Brand Standards, CTAs

• Team/Approval Methodology

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