Great to see other research out there validating the issues around the lack of training in marketing.
As part of their 2025 Career & Salary Survey, Marketing Week found that brief writing is a serious skills gap in marketing teams.
Some interesting findings from their study:
- 35.5% of CMOs acknowledge a skills gap around brief writing in their business
- marketers working within large organisations (250 employees and over) are more likely (37.9%) to report a knowledge gap around brief writing than their counterparts within Small & Medium Businesses (25.9%)
The difference between B2B and B2C marketers is interesting with more than a quarter (26.6%) of B2B marketers believe it’s a skills gap; this figure rises to 36.7% among their B2C peers.
Read the full article here.
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.