Wednesday, August 2, 2023

I'll Be Brief.

Just moments ago, it's about 6:30AM on Tuesday as I write this, I ran across a compendium online of about 50 ways to write a brief. Thinking it might be useful, I saved it. You never know when someone is going to ask you, "Do you have a brief form you like?"

Like many advertising practitioners, I have a fraught relationship with briefs.

To be brutal about it, I find the very notion of briefs is problematic. I think more procrastination is put into motion by the notion of the brief than maybe anything short of asking someone out on a date when you're fifteen.

I've seldom been in an agency where 93-percent of the creative teams weren't griping about the brief. Another 93-percent were waiting for the brief to be written. And another 93-percent were ignoring the brief altogether.

The idea of the brief as panacea is dopey.

The idea that the brief will unlock some sort of strategic epiphany, some revelation from an exalted mind is spurious at best. 

That's not an indictment against people who write briefs for a living. But it does bring to my mind the perennial subject-object split between people writing instructions and people who have to carry out instructions.

Think about the great Jules Dassin movie "Rififi." The thieves knew they had to silence the alarm. That's the brief. The ingenuity was spraying the alarm-box with the foam from a fire extinguisher. 




Click here, watch from 36:00-41:30 and in five-and-a-half-minutes you'll see a brilliant example of a brief being cracked.

Similarly, as Mike Tyson supposedly said, "everyone has a strategy until they get punched in the face."

The brief tells you the what.

It doesn't answer the how.

That's where the work comes in.

For better or worse, my best friends in agencies have almost always been planners. And I always regard their work not as orders but as intelligent provocations. And always, I get to the point where I take the brief and say to myself, 'how do I simplify this?' 'How do I clarify this?' 'How do I sexify this?' 'How do I make this work?'

The world of advertising and the world in general has come to rely way too much on if-then propositions and way too little on independent thought and ingenuity. That's why you really can't get customer-service help anymore, from either a carbon-based lifeform or a binary-based bot. 

They only know best-practices. Not human-practices. So they'll tell you to press 1 through 4 for problems 1 through 4. But what if you have problem 7? You're shit out of luck.

This is not a screed against briefs.

It is, as always, a screed against excuses not to think. 

There are way too many of those excuses.

And way too many ways to excuse those excuses.

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Creative Brief Bank

Collected by Baiba Matisone

How to write a Creative Brief?

Creative Brief Templates

Creative Brief Examples

Books

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