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 Binkley and Vassilis Douros sit down with BetterBriefs co-founders Pieter-Paul von Weiler and Matt Davies to unpack a marketer’s most important tool: the creative brief. If you’ve ever battled vague objectives, shifting priorities, or endless rounds of rework, this conversation shows how to write clear marketing briefs that actually move the numbers.

Across the episode, we break down what “good” looks like: defining business outcomes, the behaviour change required, and the attitudinal shifts that support it—then turning those choices into a single-minded brief that sets teams up for standout work. You’ll learn practical ways to align stakeholders, shorten approval cycles, improve idea evaluation, and avoid the waste that poor briefing creates.

We also explore the role of AI in brief writing—what it can accelerate (research, synthesis, quality checks) and where human judgment still matters (making choices, setting strategy, protecting brand meaning). If your teams write briefs, approve briefs, or evaluate creative ideas, this episode is a blueprint for more effective marketing—and fewer costly do-overs. Expect candid takes, examples from global brands, and simple tools you can apply today.

Listen to the podcast here, first published on 8 May 2025. 

Prefer to read? The full podcast transcript is available below. 

SBP120: Creative Briefs That Don't Suck. With Pieter-Paul von Weiler and Matt Davies. 

Marc Binkley: The creative brief is probably the most important strategic document in all of marketing, and yet hardly any of us have ever been trained on it. In this episode, we sat down with Pieter-Paul and Matt Davies from BetterBriefs to talk about what we can learn about how to make better briefs, how to evaluate ideas better, and how we can make a bigger commercial impact.

Marc Binkley: Well, welcome to The Sleeping Barber. This episode is super exciting. We've got a couple of people from the future for us. That's right. Being in Canada, it's Tuesday for us and Wednesday for you. We've got Pieter-Paul von Weiler and Matt Davies from BetterBriefs. I keep thinking about it as the project because I always think about the paper you produced. We're super excited to have you here. Thanks for joining us.

There's a lot that we'll get into about this. I've mentioned the BetterBriefs Project, which is one of the first things that I had seen from you and the work you've done. You've since done this BetterIdeas Project. We all know that creative is super important. And the one stat I use all the time from you—which we'll talk more about—is marketers (myself included) think we're amazing at writing a brief. Agency partners don't agree so much. We'll talk about that and how to improve, but also about making better ideas. To start, maybe we could start with your backgrounds. There isn't really a job description out there for most people thinking about what they want to do when they grow up. And it's not usually about writing briefs. I wanted to know: what's the background that got you into this position and founding a company that focuses on this?

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: So both Matt and I have a background as agency strategists, which is a niche profession in agencies where you are the first person to take the brief from a brand and make sense of it for creative teams. We've been doing that all our life, and that's basically the only profession we've had until we started BetterBriefs. Wherever we worked—in many different places and categories—we saw a mixture of brief quality land on our desks. That starts to add up, especially when you're in the business 20 years or so. You start to wonder why this is happening in every category, everywhere. Why has some award‑winning work even started with a poor brief? What's going on?

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: That became a recurring question in conversation between Matt and me. We worked together for a while at the same agency in Melbourne and started to look into the matter. We went beyond the daily cursing of “here’s another bad brief” and started to look into it. It turned out that such an important document—arguably the most important document that exchanges hands from brand to agency—had hardly any research done on it. As strategists, you're curious and you always want to know what's going on. You're always asking why. We reached out to friends, a research agency called Flood + Partners, and we put a survey into market.

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: We basically filled a knowledge gap. We got over 1,700 respondents to take the survey. We weren't researchers—we were just curious and wanted to fill this gap. Suddenly, we had the largest and only global study into marketing briefs. And that was the start of BetterBriefs.

Matt Davies: You say that briefs are niche, but they're actually the pointy end of a lot of thinking. That's what excites us about them. It's all the marketing strategy that a brand has been working through, distilled into a one‑ or two‑page document that agencies take and use to feed into the creative process. They're so important. Through briefs we get to see the ambition of our clients: what their strategies look like, what success looks like for them as an organization, and what insights and problems they're working through. It's the point where the commercial nature of a business and their desire to have a return on their marketing investment meets execution.

Matt Davies: Hence, BetterBriefs became the name. If we get to better briefs, we can impact businesses in the right way. It also led us to think about another area where strategists are naturally involved: ideas. We deal with ideas in their infancy—very early—in agencies. It's our job to nurture the right ones along with creatives and account management and get the right ones in front of clients—the ones that deliver to the brief. The BetterIdeas Project came about as a natural extension of BetterBriefs. The brief is not what sees the light of day, it's the creative work that drives effectiveness. Those two things combined—a better input and a better output—should have a really positive effect on any organization we work with.

Vassilis Douros: As you were talking about this, Pieter‑Paul, I agree with you that the brief is one of the most important artifacts that exchanges hands between client and agency. In your experience, does the structure or way the brief is put together become a window into the client? Sometimes you can tell, “oh boy, this is going to be a slog,” or “we're in a good spot.” Or have you been proved wrong—do some terrible briefs actually turn out okay in the end?

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: I like where you're going. There are clear signals when briefs are as good as they can be and when they’re not. If a 10‑ or 20‑page brief lands on your desk, that's not a summary of strategic thinking—that's a dumping ground. The heart of the brief should be one or two pages. Appendices can be extensive, but the series of core decisions that brands need to make to brief agencies should be short. That's what “brief” means.

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: Another clue is the objective section (or “picture of success”). If that’s unclear, it’s a sign of a very poor brief. If you can't tell your agency what you're trying to achieve—the commercial outcome, the behavior change required, and the attitudinal shifts needed—how can you start the ideation process? Businesses invest in marketing to drive better business results. We're passionate that creativity needs to deliver commercial results. So, be clear on what you want to achieve commercially, what needs to happen behaviorally to deliver that, and what attitudinally needs to change to influence behavior. Those three elements are crucial when painting a picture of success for your agency. Without them, they can’t start.

Matt Davies: Another tell: who's writing the brief and who's involved? We're fortunate to work with amazing clients—LinkedIn, AT&T, LEGO, and other brands—who are good at what they do and want to elevate their brief writing. There are organizations where you're not allowed to touch a brief until you’re seven years in—you shadow brief writers and processes until you understand what’s expected. Others let briefs pass through easily because they believe they can “catch” misdirection at the idea stage. That’s a very expensive way to use the creative process. You're letting your agency work out the strategy instead of giving clear direction.

Matt Davies: A brief that isn’t treated like a contract—internally with stakeholders and externally with agency partners—is designed to fail. It won’t have the alignment, clarity, and craft required to measure impact from day one through to post‑campaign.

Marc Binkley: Coming back to the stat about brief quality—the 80% vs 10% gap between marketers’ self‑assessment and agencies’ assessment—are those the factors that drive the wedge between them?

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: Who’s right—marketers or agencies? We argue there’s a lack of alignment. They're on different planets with different definitions of a good brief. Both sides need to do better. If you're a marketer, check in with your agency: “Is everybody truly clear? Is the picture of success clear? Is the target clear? Is the brief single‑minded? Does it give you a springboard?” Agencies, on the other hand, accept poor briefs too easily: “Let’s take this brief and figure it out at the agency.” That's a mistake. Asking questions isn't being confrontational; it’s about clarification so the larger team downstream isn’t affected by a poor brief.

Matt Davies: The best time to talk about a brief or creativity is when there isn’t a brief or idea on the table. The best results come from long‑term relationships with clear creative ambition. We ask to see the client’s brief template and structure so we can share what happens inside the agency when we receive it—what information we need and how we use it to get to creativity. Creativity isn’t something that just arrives in the shower. It’s an iterative process where many people have an impact. Communication is easier when there isn’t a screaming deadline and a million eyes on a brief.

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: Tip for marketers: don't let briefs come as a surprise. Give your agencies a heads‑up on what briefs are coming in the next 12 months. Share a brief when it's 80–90% done and invite agency partners into the last decisions—if you’re torn between two propositions or directions, get their perspective. Briefing should be teamwork, not last‑minute surprises.

Vassilis Douros: In the prep for this, we noted roadblocks like lack of training, confusing priorities, and unclear language. “Confusing priorities” is the one I struggle with. If there’s one thing on the brief, priorities should be buttoned down. Where are the biggest barriers when these briefs come in?

Matt Davies: First, multiple strategies trying to find their way into one brief. People think it’s faster and cheaper to try to do as much as possible with one brief: acquire new customers, retain existing ones, and grow existing ones. They all end up in one brief. We say: one strategy should guide one brief. That often means two or three briefs, not because we want to create more paperwork, but to ensure focus. What we say to acquire new customers is different from what we say to retain existing ones. There may be different proof points and messages, channels, and executions. Cramming it all into one brief reduces clarity and creates stakeholder swirl.

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: Another one is poor strategic thinking in general. A brief should be the summary of all the strategic thinking a brand has done. If the strategy is poor—or worse, nonexistent—the brief writer will struggle. The brief isn’t the starting point; the marketing strategy is. If the strategy is bad, the brief is going to be bad and the idea will be bad. That wastes money.

Marc Binkley: We've had Roger Martin on the show. Strategy is about choices. If you don’t see choices—what we will and won’t do—then there’s clearly not a defined strategy. You end up with a laundry list of to‑dos.

Matt Davies: Without clear choices, the brief becomes “choose your own adventure.” Those paths branch further as you go, and by the time you get to an idea, you can be far from the original intent.

Vassilis Douros: Sometimes a poor marketing strategy reflects a poor organizational strategy. You can reverse‑engineer the brief and see that the organization doesn’t know which way it’s going. How often have you had to have that heart‑to‑heart with a client that a big chunk is missing?

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: Quite often. Let me flip it to when the strategy is strong and what the marketer’s responsibility is. Marketing is about making money for an organization. As a marketer, you need to understand how marketing makes money. One key tool is brand health metrics. How does shifting a metric drive business results? What happens if awareness increases by 10%? If consideration or preference increases by 5–10%? It’s not an exact science; it’s modeling. But with the right metrics and analysts, you can understand which levers to pull and what contribution to sales you might expect. Most agencies want to know how their clients make money because it deepens their understanding of how ideas should influence behavior and attitudes.

Marc Binkley: Profitability matters. Willingness to pay, price elasticity, market share—those are business metrics, not just clicks. Sometimes marketers lack confidence and focus and get distracted by the wrong things.

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: We should focus on centers of excellence like Effies and IPA Effectiveness papers. Those are sources every marketer should learn from—how creativity can make more money for your organization.

Matt Davies: In large organizations, marketers often have to dig through multiple pockets of information—product, research and insights, etc. There’s often a disconnect between what “success” means in a brief and where that comes from in the business. We’ve been in training sessions where the insights team says, “We have that information,” and the marketer says, “Really? I didn’t know.” That lack of internal communication leads to wishful thinking in briefs not grounded in business reality.

Marc Binkley: On ideas: Kantar’s Paul Dyson showed profit multipliers of brand size and creativity. Creativity was #2, yet many marketers rank it much lower. To be effective, you need a good idea. But we often hear, “I’ll know it when I see it.” Thoughts on that kind of feedback?

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: Everyone can have an opinion on creative ideas—it doesn’t make the opinion professional or the feedback constructive. That goes back to training. Hardly anyone has been trained in how to manage ideas. Ideas are fragile and often die quickly before they’re properly assessed. They need care and professional evaluation, and that’s not happening enough.

Matt Davies: Only 10% of organizations, based on our latest research, have a formal framework to assess creativity objectively. That means 9 out of 10 evaluate each idea on its own merits without a shared understanding of the creative ambition of the organization. We need guardrails: What kind of ideas are right for our business and brand? What’s our risk appetite? What category conventions are we looking to disrupt—and which to respect so we remain relevant? Through the research we identified criteria to help find impactful work: Is it engaging for the target audience (not us)? Will it earn attention in a cluttered environment? Is the brand integral to the story (will attribution land)? Is the work on brief? Then add your organization’s layer: what else matters for you?

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: “I’ll know it when I see it” is wrong for many reasons. It’s a personal perspective. We need to figure out what’s right for the brand and the brief. Bring the brief into the evaluation phase; it should be in front of you when ideas show up. And the person who approved the brief should approve the idea.

Vassilis Douros: On your website you cite that $350B of global ad spend is set to go to waste due to poor briefs. Flipping that: what’s the cost of a bad brief when turning a great idea into reality? Clients don’t always see the true cost.

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: We coded ~1,800 open responses and showed the negative chain reaction a poor brief sets off. There’s a human cost. When a poor brief enters the system, agencies don’t know where to go. They come back with a wide range of ideas instead of going deep. Then we go through extra rounds: “go again,” “can I see something else?” There’s a financial and time cost, and a human cost. People get annoyed with their agency, client, or team. Over time this can break client–agency relationships and lead to talent loss. There’s an exodus from agencies and marketing because of confusion and wasted time.

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: The hard cost is scary. WARC forecasted ad spend to surpass $1 trillion this year. Our study asked people to estimate the percentage of budget wasted due to poor briefs. Agencies said ~37%; marketers ~30%. The total sample thinks it’s ~33%. Take one third of $1T—or one third of your own marketing budget—going to waste due to poor briefs and misdirected work. The opportunity is huge: invest in training, shared language, heads‑ups, and clear criteria for idea evaluation. You can make up to a third more of your existing budget work harder.

Marc Binkley: We had a scenario where a client said, “We’re burning time going back and forth on the brief and creative. How do we fix this?” Your research showed rework. Can you talk about that?

Matt Davies: There’s a lot of rework on both sides. We’re going through five rounds of revisions on average before an idea is signed off. The IPA measured it at three rounds in 2007. In 18 years, it’s gone up by two rounds. We’re spending more rounds to get to ideas we’re not as happy with as we once were. It’s often a symptom of internal misalignment. We’ve seen organizations go through many rounds to get to an approved brief, which then becomes a straitjacket for the agency—no room for creativity. In one case, the work was judged against the agency’s creative brief, not the marketer’s brief, wasting months. A practical tip: make sure you and your agency are clear on which brief is being used to evaluate the work.

Matt Davies: We worked with a great CMO who would walk into reviews with the brief in hand and ask everyone else to show theirs: “Which brief have you got?” He made it a thing because he understood the problems caused by two separate briefs.

Vassilis Douros: We keep coming back to the quality of the artifact and how we build that. What are the key elements that make a brief useful as a benchmark and as input to idea evaluation?

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: We asked people the most important element of a brief. The objectives section was by far #1—for marketers and even more so for agencies. Agencies are screaming for a clear picture of success. As a marketer, don’t try to craft a “beautiful message” at the expense of clarity. Write a single‑minded, straightforward message that provides a good springboard—and really focus on the objectives.

Marc Binkley: Without a really good brief, you stack the chips against yourself. Then you switch out creative platforms and lose compounding effects—small issues become big problems.

Matt Davies: Strategy is one thing; articulating and transferring that strategy is another. Agencies don’t always get what you’re trying to do. Communication and partnership bring amazing results. None of the Effies or accolades we’ve won came off the first brief. It’s always been a journey across years with shared ambition on how to put the brand into the world.

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: Think about other domains: if a president briefs the press poorly, it explodes in the wrong direction. If the military gets their brief wrong going into enemy territory, the compounding effects are huge. They take briefing seriously. In marketing we don’t invest enough in training. When was the last time you boarded a plane where the pilot didn’t go to flight school? Or visited a doctor who didn’t go to medical school? Or sat in a barber’s chair and said, “Start cutting—I’ll know it when I see it”?

Marc Binkley: From a training perspective, where should marketers start? What are the important needs within briefing and idea development? How do you communicate this when it's not something we are normally trained on?

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: In the old days, strategic directors took time to teach. Marketers took time to explain plans and success. I remember being trained by a global brand for two days on how they would brief us and evaluate ideas. Those two days established a shared language between brand and agency. Today we’re all doing too many immediate, urgent things and don’t take time to educate the next generation or really understand each other. It’s a partnership, not a baton pass.

Vassilis Douros: Agile became synonymous with efficiency in tech and then in marketing. There’s a belief we can move fast and iterate our way to strategy. I don't think that’s where marketing thrives. Testing and optimization work in performance, but briefs and strategy can’t just be iterative with speed. How do we put a pause in to later accelerate?

Matt Davies: Three ingredients: skills, tools, and processes. Skills—we can always get better at brief writing; keep training that muscle, not only formally but by analyzing competitors’ work. Tools—have strong tools like creative evaluation criteria and a unified template. We often see 17 different brief templates in one organization. The strategic core should be the same across initiatives; asks and practicalities will vary by specialist. Processes—we don’t always have long lead times. Sometimes we need to work iteratively. Deconstruct the brief into core elements. Have a 15‑minute stand‑up: do we have the right problem articulated? If yes, move forward. Next: do we have the right measures of success? Get alignment quickly on key components rather than on an entire document at once.

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: Before focusing people on those three, we need a reset. Most creative work doesn’t work. We operate as if everything works. Flip that mindset. Most comms are ignored. Only a handful stand out. If you think like that, you make bolder choices and more effective work.

Marc Binkley: There’s a human component too. Pride and feeling valued matter. What did you find about how proud people feel about the work they make?

Matt Davies: We asked marketers, agencies, and in‑house teams what percentage of work they’re proud of across their careers. Marketers: ~36%. Agencies: ~26%. Roughly a third or a quarter. If I were a furniture maker and proud of only a quarter of my tables, I’d change careers. I can’t think of another industry where pride in what we make is so low. The upside: when marketers inspire and empower their agencies, understand the creative ambition, and give what the agency needs, they’re three times more likely to be proud of the work. There’s light at the end of the tunnel.

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: We started BetterBriefs with the ambition to reduce the large amount of poor briefs in the world. That hasn’t changed. We published these reports to start conversations. It’s hard to walk into a marketing team and say, “We’re pretty bad at writing briefs or evaluating ideas,” so use the stats as conversation starters. After BetterBriefs, we’d seen too many situations where ideas died too quickly and wanted to do something about it. This all comes from a deep passion to improve the work our industry produces. When you see great creative that delivers commercial results—that’s why we’re here.

Vassilis Douros: What’s the role of AI in all this? More garbage in equals more garbage out—or can it help accelerate better briefing?

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: AI can help with components of the brief, but it won’t write the brief for you. A brief is a puzzle. You still need a trained, skilled marketer to make choices. Use AI to deepen understanding of your target audience, filter datasets, find relationships, or check whether your message is single‑minded. Don’t get AI to write the brief.

Matt Davies: As a strategist, I found writing the proposition challenging. Sometimes you get stuck. A tool that expands your thinking—suggests alternative angles—would be helpful. But you still make the choices.

Marc Binkley: How can people find out more about you, your courses, and your research?

Pieter-Paul von Weiler: Start with BetterBriefs.com, where you’ll find the BetterBriefs and BetterIdeas reports—use them to start a better conversation in your organization. You’ll also find courses on brief writing and idea assessment, plus our best‑practice guide on how to get a better brief co‑authored with Mark Ritson. There are lots of tools and thinking on BetterBriefs to help you. That’s why we’re doing this.

Matt Davies: I’d echo that. If you need specific help for your brand, reach out. Our training takes many formats; there’ll be something for you.

Marc Binkley: Thank you both.

Matt Davies: Thanks for having us. It was awesome.