Library

Why You Shouldn’t Forget the Brief When Evaluating Ideas

Nearly all marketers say briefs are essential for evaluating ideas, but only 15% actually use them. That gap costs time, money and better work. Why does it happen, and what can you do about it?...

How to Write a Better Marketing Brief: 6 Mistakes to Avoid

Great advertising doesn’t start with ideas, it starts with the brief. Yet most briefs fall short. Here are the six briefing traps holding teams back, and how marketers and agencies can finally get...

Why AI can't write the brief for you

There isn’t a webinar or training that goes by without us getting asked THE question by someone in attendance: How is AI impacting brief writing? And for some reason it seems, our answer often...

Why Brief Confusion Is Costing You Better Work

When clients and agencies argue about whether work is "on brief," they're often talking about completely different documents. What are they and how do you avoid this confusion?There’s a growing...

Why words are killing your briefs

On paper, a brief should be the start of something inspiring – a springboard that sparks creativity. But in reality, it’s often the opposite.

A brief is not a briefing

Marketers invest a lot of time perfecting the brief. However, too often, how the brief is delivered in the briefing gets reduced to an email or a quick run-through of the deck.

BetterBriefs to Better Results | Alan Hart Podcast

In this podcast, we sit down with Alan Hart, the host of Deloitte Digital's Marketing Beyond podcast. We discuss why marketing briefs are the most important document in the agency-marketer...

Why writing briefs doesn’t get easier with experience

It’s an odd paradox: the longer you work in the industry, the harder writing a good brief can feel.Surely with practice, it should get easier? And yet the BetterBriefs research finds the same...

The cost of poor feedback

Every extra round of feedback doesn’t just frustrate teams – it costs time, money and momentum. The longer work sits in review cycles, the slower campaigns get to market, and the harder it is to keep...

Ask Us Anything webinar

BetterBriefs hosted a webinar where marketers and agencies could literally ask us anything as long as it was related to briefs. Below you’ll find a selection of our favourite questions and how we...

Gains, losses, watchouts from AI

Mi3 interviewed us for an article on whether AI can, and should, replace humans throughout the creative supply chain. Below is a short excerpt from that article originally published on 3 September...

Inspiring Futures Podcast

Edward Cotton is a seasoned strategist working in New York and runs an excellent podcast called 'Inspiring Futures'. For our second appearance on the show - listen to the first one here - we wanted...

Never ask a friend to evaluate an idea

Strong creative ideas are driven by passion. However, getting to great ideas is hard. Let’s take a peek inside an ad agency working on a marketing brief. We see a team of creatives wrestling with a...

Why most ads fail to get noticed (and how to fix it)

The fact that you’re about to ignore this proves the very point of this article.It doesn’t matter what this says – if you don’t read it, the content doesn’t matter. The same goes for your next ad....

Marketing Week research

Great to see other research out there validating the issues around the lack of training in marketing. 

Sleeping Barber podcast

Founders Pieter-Paul von Weiler and Matt Davies joined Sleeping Barber hosts Marc Binkley and Vassilis Douros to discuss the critical role of creative briefs in marketing. 

Sleeping Barber hosts Marc...

What's stopping great ideas from flourishing?

In a webinar we did for the WFA we unpacked what's stopping great ideas from flourishing.  

Define your enemy

Marketing Strategies From Top CMOs: Five Marketing Strategies From Matt Davies and Pieter-Paul von Weiler Of BetterBriefs

‘Suboptimal process’: only 1/3 of agencies receive constructive feedback

As the BetterIdeas Project revealed, only 30% of creative agencies receive clear and constructive feedback from their clients. Whilst it's sometimes difficult to align teams and stakeholders, those...

New IPA president Karen Martin delivers rousing call to creative action

Our friends at the UK's Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) have a new President, Karen Martin. She put forward a passionate plea about the importance of creativity and claimed that the...

Poor evaluation practices hold great ideas back.

The fastest way to kill an idea

The fastest way to kill an idea is to add another one.

Strong ideas aren’t rejected outright.

They’re killed by a thousand cuts.

Watered down, overcomplicated, and revised to death.

Our friend Tom...

How to set objectives in briefs for better marketing results

Most marketing briefs fail at the first step because of unclear objectives. Without them, campaigns lose focus, ideas miss the mark and results go unmeasured.

Best Practice Guide & UK results launch

In 2022, at IPA’s Business Growth Conference, we launched a new best-practice guide titled 'The best way for a client to brief an agency'. Co-authored by Mark Ritson and published in partnership with...

Mark Ritson on strategy in briefs

Getting the strategy right before writing a brief is essential. And as Mark Ritson outlines many marketers struggle with this. The data from the BetterBriefs Project research was a key catalyst in...

Marketing's $200bn black hole

October 2021 was a watershed moment for the marketing industry as BetterBriefs launched its groundbreaking study into where most briefs go wrong and the financial impact a poor brief has.

In one of...

The Marketoonist on what bad briefs look like

Based on the findings of our BetterBriefs Project, Tom Fishburne a.k.a. The Marketoonist developed this very clever cartoon.

Creative, or marketing briefs as they're also known, can go wrong in so...