BetterBriefs’ view is that a strong marketing brief should be highly specific about the problem to solve, the target audience and the desired outcome, while leaving the agency free to determine the creative idea and execution. A brief can never be too clear about the problem; it can easily be too prescriptive about the solution.
Be precise about the problem, audience and measurable outcome.
Avoid suggesting executions, campaign references, taglines, tone, channels or formats unless they are genuine constraints.
The marketer defines what must change and why; the agency determines how to make it happen.
The best marketing briefs create strategic clarity without narrowing the range of possible creative solutions.
Good briefs provide clear direction. However, how prescriptive should marketing briefs be? The answer is: very. But only about some things, and not at all about others.
Some marketers include pages and pages of background in a brief. Others prefer to keep things short but broad in an attempt to give the agency lots of freedom to do their job. So, how much information is the right amount? And can a brief become too prescriptive?
- what the problem to solve is
- who the target audience is
- what the desired outcome is
The problem to solve: what needs to change and why. It’s not good enough to describe it vaguely, e.g. “we need to sell more” or “we want to grow awareness”. It should be defined specifically, e.g. “we’re losing consideration among 25–34-year-olds who are increasingly seeing our brand as old-fashioned”. When you define the problem with precision, you give the agency something real and tangible to solve. When you keep it vague or leave it open, the agency will have to define the problem for you, and they’ll probably define it differently from you.
The target audience: who they are, what they currently think and what you want them to think, feel or do differently. The more specific the audience, the more specific the idea. Generalisations and poor targeting, e.g., "let’s target men AND women", won’t give the agency a chance to focus and develop strong creative thinking or spot opportunities.
The desired outcome: what success looks like in measurable terms. The more precisely it’s defined, the more useful it becomes. When the desired outcome is clear, it’s so much easier for the agency to think laterally about how to achieve it.
After laying out the problem, too many briefs keep going, suggesting how the idea should feel (“warm and humorous”). They indicate what kind of activity it should be (“we’d love something that lots of people share”). They include references of work the marketing team admires, offered up as a way to guide the agency toward a particular style.
While these prompts might seem beneficial, each is a small creative decision made before the creative process begins. And each one narrows the solution space in ways that aren’t always obvious. It may feel like a helpful springboard, but usually it’s more like an anchor. Creative teams are human; they’ll orient their thinking around the reference even when they’re trying not to. So as a marketer, you’re unintentionally closing doors and opportunities. The best ideas are usually the ones nobody thought of before the brief was written.
The same applies to execution suggestions. When a brief says “we’re thinking of using a celebrity and a series of short social videos”, the agency’s job shifts from solving a problem to executing a half-formed idea. Unless those ideas are strategically sound, they’re not really adding anything and worse, they limit the opportunity for the agency to surprise you with something fresh and more original.
When Compare the Market, the online price comparison service, was in its early stages, it had a specific problem. The word "market" was difficult to own and very expensive to buy as a search term. The marketing brief outlined very tightly defined outcomes: grow top-of-mind awareness and minimise cost-per-acquisition. VCCP's answer was comparethemeerkat.com, a fictional, aristocratic meerkat called Aleksandr and an entirely invented brand universe that had nothing to do with insurance.
The campaign was an immediate success, won multiple effectiveness prizes and the idea is still running 17 years later. It only exists because the outcomes were defined precisely enough to be solved. The best creative answers are often lateral ones. But lateral thinking requires something solid to push against.
There’s no such thing as too much clarity on any of these three things. Argue about them, sign off on them, treat them as non-negotiable. They become the brief.
That’s when you stop being prescriptive.
Think of it like this: the brief should stop before “therefore, the communications need to…”
Everything before that line is the marketer’s job: defining what needs to happen and why. Everything after it is the agency's. A brief that crosses that line, however well-meaning, starts doing their job for them (usually worse).
Next time you’re writing a brief, find the point at which it stops defining the problem and starts suggesting a solution. Keep everything before that line. Cut everything after it. If what’s left doesn’t feel like enough direction, the brief isn’t finished yet. Resist the instinct to pad it out with execution ideas. Instead go back and sharpen the problem.
The brief’s job is to hand the agency a problem they can’t wait to solve. Not a solution they’re expected to execute. If the work does not require a new idea, it may only need a short, prescriptive task brief. Task briefs are appropriate for executional work such as resizes, adaptations or new executions of an existing campaign. When fresh creative thinking is required, however, the brief should define the strategic problem and leave the solution open.
Too open |
Too prescriptive |
|
no clearly defined strategy |
includes executional direction and ideas |
|
no clear problem to solve |
includes tonal direction |
|
no tightly defined target audience |
the message is written as a tagline |
|
no clear picture of what success looks like |
pre-test process hacks |
|
leaves strategic decisions to the agency |
specifies the channel or format without clear argument |
An earlier version of this article was published in Campaign Asia.
Yes. A marketing brief becomes too prescriptive when it tells the agency how to solve the problem by specifying the creative idea, tone, execution, channel or reference work without a valid strategic reason. A strong brief is precise about the strategy but open about the creative solution.
A marketing brief should clearly define three things: the problem to solve, the target audience and the desired outcome. It should explain what needs to change, for whom and what measurable success looks like. Read more about how to write a marketing brief and which mistakes to avoid.
The marketer should define what must change and why. The agency should determine how communications can create that change, including the creative idea, tone, format, channel mix and execution.
Pieter-Paul von Weiler is the co-founder of BetterBriefs, an advisory and training business that helps marketers write better briefs and deliver more impactful ideas. A highly awarded former agency strategist, having worked at Publicis Amsterdam, Publicis London, Saatchi & Saatchi and AJF Partnership. Pieter-Paul has served as an Effie judge across Australia and APAC for over a decade.
Together with co-founder Matt Davies, he wrote the BetterBriefs Project and The Best Way for a Client to Brief an Agency, a practical guide for marketers to improve the quality of briefs, co-authored by Mark Ritson and published in partnership with the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA). Pieter-Paul (together with Matt) also led the BetterIdeas Project, a global study exposing the poor state of the creative evaluation process. The study aims to improve the creative decision-making and evaluation practices and was launched in partnership with the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and the IPA.