Creating an Advertising Brief

A detailed creative brief will start the campaign on exactly the right foot. An imprecise and insufficiently detailed brief could result in an advertising campaign that is aimed at the wrong audience or otherwise misses the mark. Provide the agency or consulting firm with as much information as possible, so that it can produce a campaign that achieves maximum results.

On the client side, the briefing team is likely to include a marketing executive, a sales executive, and any relevant marketing specialists, such as those from promotions or direct mail. The person who has the final say must be involved in defining the brief. The team should also include product and marketing specialists to provide detailed information on the product, target market, and competitors. It is sometimes helpful to involve the agency team in preparing the brief, although in practice this does not always happen.

Revise and strengthen the brief by circulating it to a small but knowledgeable group of marketing and/or product experts, for feedback or approval.

The goal is always to define measurable objectives, although this is sometimes a difficult task. Agencies may contend that results depend on factors outside their control, but it should be possible to isolate the communications objectives and define a way of measuring them. For example, a direct response campaign can be measured by the response rate, while a corporate campaign could be assessed through opinion surveys conducted before and after the campaign. The more specific the brief, the easier it is to assess the results of the creative work.

In today's world, advertising is everywhere. Consumers are bombarded with advertising messages everywhere they turn—not only in broadcast media and publications, but also on grocery carts, in taxi cabs, and even in schools. Therefore, your advertisement must achieve immediate impact to succeed.

How will you present your message? As you carefully plan your approach, perform these three essential checks, which apply to any media:

• Does it have immediate impact?
• Does it meet the needs of the reader, listener, or viewer?
• Does it stimulate a response?

Great creative ideas rarely occur in a vacuum; they result as a response to a clearly defined problem. By preparing a comprehensive creative brief, the writers and designers working on your campaign can approach the creative process in a disciplined, logical way. The creative brief is a vital part of the process, whether your creative services are supplied by an internal organization or an external agency.

When briefing the agency or consulting firm, begin with the project background. Address these important questions:

• What is the overall objective of the project?
• What threats and opportunities does the business face?
• Why is the project being undertaken?
• How does the project fit into the overall marketing program?
• Why is it necessary to advertise?

The background material should include any research that you have conducted or relied upon. It is important to consider the campaign in the context of other marketing activities being performed by your company, or its competitors.

It is important to clearly define the results that the campaign is intended to achieve and describe any response expected from your target audience. The brief should detail multiple, specific objectives, including overall corporate objectives as well as the marketing objectives. State the communications objective and how it contributes to the wider marketing objectives. For example, you may strive to raise product awareness within a new region, in order to enable a specific increase in sales volume.

The campaign objectives must be detailed and specific. For example:

• generate 5,000 prospects and convert 3.5% of them;
• reach 100 new decision makers within Fortune 1000 companies and convey an understanding of your product's business benefits;
• raise awareness within 15% of a competitor's customer base.

Always enable the creative team with any relevant or supporting research information. This might include, but is not limited to:

• customer surveys, interviews, or analysis;
• industry surveys;
• competitive analysis;
• industry analyst reports or recommendations;
• product reviews;
• press coverage or analyst opinion on the product or company;
• focus group conclusions or recommendations;
• results of previous campaigns.

The creative brief for an effective advertising campaign should include detailed competitive information. For example:

• which competitors provide a similar product or service;
• how the competitive offering compares—perhaps specifically a comparison of your product's key benefits against the competition;
• the market share commanded by those competitors, and/or other indicators of their success;
• how competitors are perceived by customers.

Competitive information and analysis can be critical in helping creative teams identify key benefits to differentiate your product from the competitors' offerings. It can also demonstrate how other companies have tackled the problem of describing a similar product or service.

Describe the product or service in detail, providing answers to the following questions:

• What is the product?
• What is the product used for, and by whom?
• How does the product operate?
• What are the main benefits for the customer?
• What are the key advantages over competitive products?

Consider providing the creative team an opportunity to use or experience your product or service in the same way as a customer. This can greatly enhance team members' ability to create an effective campaign with maximum impact.

A comprehensive description of your campaign's target audience will help the creative team to focus its message on the key decision makers. Consider these questions:

• What type(s) of company or organization buy the product?
• Which industry are they in?
• How big are these companies?
• Who are the primary decision makers?
• What is their role in the decision making process?
• Who are their key influencers?
• What are their business concerns?
• What is their perception of your company and its products?
• What is their perception of your competitors and their products?

In a creative brief, it is essential to include the key company or product messages that are most important to the target audience. The task of the creative team is not to invent these messages, but to communicate them as effectively as possible. The creative brief should therefore describe the current perceptions held by the target audience, as well as the new perceptions you wish to create as a result of the campaign.

Before finalizing, circulate the creative brief to all members of the group involved in the project. Everyone involved should review and sign off on the brief before creative work begins. After final approval, project members should not be able to change the brief without good reason.

Some agencies will present their ideas without expecting payment, but not all. If you are not offering payment for initial ideas, make this clear before expecting anything of value from the team. If you are compensating the team for their presentation of ideas, agree on the terms in advance and establish who will own the ideas once the initial presentation is finished.

Let the creative team know how their work will be reviewed and evaluated. This can take place at a number of levels:

• agency and/or client team review,
• focus group evaluation,
• pilot campaigns in test markets.

It is possible to make a brief too specific. If a creative brief is overly constraining, it may effectively rule out creative approaches that might have achieved outstanding results. The creative team requires information to focus their attention on the problem, not suggestions on how the problem should be solved.

Although the brief should allow the creative team ample freedom, it is equally important to achieve integration of creative work across different media. Do not create "islands" of creative efforts. If advertising is the dominant medium, the team is working on direct marketing should relate their approach to the advertising theme. Repetition of the same creative theme across different media reinforces the key messages and improves overall awareness.

Creative work should be accountable. The agency may have a brilliant, award-winning creative idea, but it will be a waste of money if it fails to produce the intended results. The entire team should remain acutely aware of the specific objectives of the campaign; it is not enough to just create a catchy slogan or design a visually attractive layout.

Ogilvy, David. Ogilvy on Advertising. New York: Vintage, 1985.

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