Want to Master Your Next Creative Brief? 10 Key Sections to Cover

The well-written creative brief. It’s a dying art form on par with handwritten notes and voicemail. Given shrinking bandwidth, tighter deadlines, and the need to parse through research, analytics, and strategy documents, the creative brief is often the first thing to suffer.

A casualty of the overly committed who perceive the process of creating them as anything but, well… brief.

But when creative briefs do suffer or, worse, disappear altogether, they can wreak all sorts of havoc by inspiring unfocused work, unworkable ideas, and leaps made on faulty assumptions. And when that happens, nobody wins.

Resources get misspent, and work misses the mark due to a flagrant lack of insight or direction. The blame game starts, and discontent ensues.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. There is a slew of simple guidelines that each author can follow.

Given creative, marketing, or campaign briefs exist in all areas of business — advertising, media, PR, design, architecture — understanding the art of how to produce a good one is important.

Whether you’re a client tasked with creating a content brief for freelancers or a content creator charged with writing or dissecting creative briefs from a client, there are 10 key sections you’ll want to know.

What are the main elements of a creative brief?

1. Objective — Premise for what the campaign needs to achieve
2. What — Information about your product or service
3. Why — Why your product or service is important
4. Who — The audience you are targeting
5. Key takeaways — Key points you want the audience to remember
6. Metrics — The metric goals that determine success
7. Tone of voice — The way you communicate your message
8. Thought starters — Ideas to kick off brainstorming
9. Budget — The scope of investment, whether time or money
10. Timeline — The calendar of deliverables and action items

10 key creative brief sections

The objective

The best way to set the right tone for a creative brief is to lay out the campaign goals in a clear, concise objective section at the top.

Doing this may seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many marketers put ambiguous filler here that creates more questions than answers.

So, what is the objective? The simple premise for what this campaign needs to achieve in terms of overall success, awareness, and impact. Essentially, the most relevant thing you hope will be accomplished with this work.

Examples:

• “Develop an integrated, multi-platform campaign and unforgettable content experience”
• “Create a ‘must-see’ level of anticipation across all consumer touch points.”

These objective morsels give the reader an immediate grasp of what’s expected, a snapshot at the deliverables, and a peek at the high bar desired for the first round of ideas and, ultimately, the final work.

As the author of a creative brief, your objective should be to take the objective seriously. That way, you’ll engage the newly enlightened reader and keep them reading down the page to the next section…

The what

Here’s where the brief should give the right amount of background about the product for the team to create — be it a toy, a deodorant, or a new TV show season. The context, insight, and background into what it took to bring such a radically innovative thing to fruition.

Here’s where the marketer should hold nothing back to instruct, inform, and enthrall when it comes to letting people know about their spectacular product or service. But, beware: Don’t go into so much detail that the most important details get lost.

The why

“Why” is one of the most important parts of the brief template next to the objective. It’s the part that isolates why this thing you’re being asked to market was created, why people should care, and why it should be separated from the rest.

For example, is your product an answer to all the things currently wrong with the world? Is it a solution to a human problem? Does it give people something they never knew they needed? Does it tell a story people need to hear? Why is it… different?

Here’s an excerpt from a creative brief for Avión Tequila. It has a great angle for expressing why they were different from other tequila makers:

Meticulously Inefficient: The process of creating Avión is one of painstaking passion and dedication to tradition – which elevates Avión to an art. It is inefficient in every aspect of the process: Agave from only the highest elevation is used, the Agave is allowed 7-10 years for maturation before harvesting, it is hand-made and hand-processed rather than mass produced or outsourced, and it is slow roasted for 3 days allowing for ultra slow filtration and aging. An almost forgotten path of craftsmanship and love – that’s the meticulous part. Where the art form of tequila takes all precedence over time and money. When you are elevating Tequila to an art, efficiency becomes meaningless.

The who

Is there any more valuable section than knowing exactly who you’re targeting with your work — and sharing any insights around what you know about them?

In this area, we’ve seen the gamut of explanations, ranging from short and sweet (i.e., “People who are health/fitness conscious, runners, athletes”) to in-depth and thoroughly researched segmentation studies that break down the psychographics of who you’re trying to appeal to.

Either could work depending on the context of everything else in the brief. Just make sure you give a snapshot of not just who your desired audience is, but the aspirational targets as well. Markets both current… and untapped.

Sometimes you’ll even see a first-person description from the desired audience that gives you a quick peek into how they think. Here’s one such Who section from a brief for a high-end luxury audio manufacturer:

I want to hear music as the artist intended and I search for equipment that offers the absolute best listening and quality construction. I don’t buy that often so I want something that will last and provide me with a warm, intimate listening experience with my music; whether it’s on vinyl, SACD or wide-bandwidth, online listening.

The key takeaways

In a world fueled by distraction, the occasional synopsis summing things up in the form of a few brief bullets is never a bad thing. In that realm, a nice and tidy key takeaways section serves a dual purpose by doing the following:

1. Sums up in a few short words what you want the audience to ultimately take away.
2. Delivers a short/sweet buffer against people who don’t like reading — the scanners of the world — who are too busy to digest your entire brief.

Essentially, here’s your chance to convey the central idea you want your audience to ultimately take away from your impressive, well-thought out, insanely well-executed content campaign.

For example, if you were marketing a fictitious board game for the holidays called “The Board Game for the Bored” where people get to play embarrassing practical jokes on each other, your desired takeaways for the audience might sound something like this:

• “The Board Game for the Bored” is a dark, fun, must-have stocking stuffer that will make you and your family LOL for years to come.
• This stunt-y aspect sounds a lot different from all other board games before it.
• “The Board Game for the Bored” is going to create amazing social media moments.

The metrics

It always helps to know at the launch of a brief how the success of a campaign will ultimately be judged by the client putting it out. So, when you’re filling out this section, ask yourself:

• What are reasonable guardrails to expect given the work and media budget allotted for this campaign?
• How many impressions do you hope to gain?
• Likes, shares, and comments?
• What amount of earned media will make this your best case study yet?

This doesn’t just create transparency, but it gives the content creators the gift of focus at the beginning of ideation to steer their explorations and creative development in a refreshing and healthy way.

The tone of voice

A creative brief is a great place to give a general sense of how a client perceives their product in terms of voice, tone, and style.

In that realm, come up with simple adjectives that indicate how creative teams should be communicating your message and the overall emotions you’re looking to evoke with the creative work, campaign, or video executions.

For instance, using the previous example of “The Board Game for the Bored,” your tone-of-voice description might look like this:

Bold, youthful, humorous, entertaining, witty, millennial-minded, etc.

All descriptive words that will jump off your brief and check a box along the way.

The thought-starters

Consider including thought starters (questions to challenge the way you think) to kick off a brainstorm. Thought starters can inspire the final ideas that became part of the bought campaign.

When they’re good, they narrow the focus. When they’re not, you can simply ignore them. But having solid thought starters and keeping them in mind as you ideate is never a bad idea. It can help generate buy-in and ultimately even make the client feel like they have a stake in the final campaign.

Not a bad idea if you want to collaborate in the future.

The budget

Now that we’ve covered the must-have sections you’ll want to include in your next brief, there’s one more ingredient that can help in the realm of managing expectations: Budget. Small ones can help reign in big P.T. Barnum-like thinking. And big ones will give creatives the ability to think free-range without too many constraints at the start.

Sharing what funds are dedicated to the cause will not only steer the ideation, but will provide necessary guardrails that will keep the inevitable brainstorm from going off the rails.

There’s nothing worse than getting a ton of ideas you’ll never be able to execute because budget precludes it. Put a few dollar signs in there — if just to ballpark it — and the teams tasked with interpreting the brief will always be better off.

The timeline

Finally, don’t forget dates to keep all key stakeholders on track and accountable. If you’re tasked with constructing (or deconstructing) a brief, including the dates for deliverables will be crucial to convey:

1. When initial proposals and the first round of ideas are due
2. Dates for feedback and revision rounds
3. The media plan rollout (if applicable)
4. When the content/campaign will ultimately launch

Number four being key. Because that’s when you get to experience the rollout for all that amazing work completed because you had a super-informative, thoroughly researched creative brief to work off from the very start.

Now, here’s to wishing only the greatest of creative briefs to all!

Want some help creating creative briefs and high-quality content? Talk to a content specialist at ClearVoice and find out how we can help with everything from strategy to content creation.