7. Crafting a creative brief that actually encourages creativity
The brief to end all briefs (and a free download)
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I can very clearly remember a time, early in my tech career, when I was asked to create an event series for our company.
Oh boy! I thought. A whole event series! I wonder if Jon Hamm is available to emcee!
But before I could even prepare my Emmy speech, the brief began evolving.
It had to be a series of webinars.
It had to be on these specific topics.
It had to be this specific list of guest speakers.
It had to move the needle on revenue but also be super engaging, and oh btw can I make sure everyone at the company shares about it on social media multiple times because virality?
Seems to be that creative briefs often turn this direction, inexorably toward the predestination of others and into impossible traps of goals, resources, and opinions. Constraints, of course, can be a boon to creative work. But when you’re given a creative brief that reads more like a creative order, it can feel as if the rug got pulled out from under you.
Just say no to rug-pulling!
We’ve seen creative briefs do the job they’re supposed to do: Encourage creativity.
And we’re happy to share the process for making a creative brief to pitch to your boss or hand to your team, where there’s still loads and loads of room for creative exploration.
First things first …
What even is a creative brief?
A creative brief is a document that outlines the creative approach and deliverables of a project.
Briefs can be created by anyone within an organization. Managers may create briefs in order to propose work to their teams. Individuals may create briefs as proposals to get approved by managers.
Here’s a version of a brief that we’ve used in past roles in B2B and B2C marketing. Feel free to make a copy and use it for yourself and your teams.
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How to encourage creativity with a creative brief
All creative briefs should have a few key elements:
The problem: What problem are we solving with this work?
Why are we solving it?
Who are we solving it for?
What key insight do we have about this audience or this problem?
The goal: What are the goals of this campaign or project?
The concept: What is the main message we’re trying to get across?
What do we want our audience to feel?
What action do we want them to take?
The outputs: What are the key deliverables?
What channels do we expect to use?
Anything we’re inspired by?
When it comes to a creative brief that encourages creativity, simply having the context from each of these sections will be super useful. But it’s also important to consider how you fill out each section. Too much direction can be stifling. Too little can be futile.
Here’s some ideas about how to make each section as creatively expansive as possible.
1 - How to stage the problem
To allow creativity to thrive, you need to describe problems, not solutions. If your problem statement is phrased as an output, you’ve crossed the problem-solution line. You must turn back!
A helpful way to think about this is the distinction between benefits and features: Benefits can be experienced many different ways, but a feature is just that: a discrete, immutable feature. If you give a creative person an outcome you want to achieve, they will be more than capable of coming up with the output.
Outcome is not the same as output. A bad brief often confuses the outcome with the output and ends up defining deliverables (the output) rather than the impact (outcome).
For example, do you know where the original Jobs-To-Be-Done insight came from? Milkshakes! A fast-food chain noticed that milkshake sales were surprisingly high in the mornings, and they came to realize that milkshakes were doing the “Job” of providing a calorie-rich, on-the-go “meal” that consumers could commute with. Talk about an interesting problem-solution. Now think of all the creative solutions someone could come up with given the problem of on-the-go morning meals (milkshakes might still make the cut).
2 - How to set up goals
My favorite goal mantra is this: If you have two goals, you have zero goals.
To put it less dramatically, a project should never have more than one goal because it is going to confuse all the stakeholders and dilute your final product. To encourage creativity, you need one clear goal that everyone is driving toward and brainstorming about.
It’s okay if the goal is revenue; it’s definitely okay if the goal is brand awareness. But don’t let the goal be both because you’ll muddy the creative process.
3 - How to articulate the concept
The creative concept is where you expect to be most prescriptive with your creative brief – without specifically saying what to do. (Remember our lesson from earlier: Focus your brief on outcome, not output.) The creative concept is where the most helpful constraints live. In the concept section, you want to describe:
The key messages you want to get across
The way you want recipients to feel
The action you want them to take
It can even be helpful to list the inverse of the above: what you’re excluding from the campaign, what messages you don’t need to worry about, what emotions you want to avoid.
4 - How to determine the outputs
No one wants to be given a creative brief for an event series and then be told they have to make webinars. I should know! To avoid this fate and to keep your creators invigorated in their creative process, try these two things:
Think channels, not tactics. You can want social media, but you don’t need to prescribe a viral video. You can want a digital event, but you don’t need to clamor for a 60-minute fireside chat. Let your people come up with the specifics.
Speak about your inspiration. Creative thinkers can take a comparative example and deconstruct it to find new ways to accomplish a similar vibe. If you simply share what inspires you, the team can come up with new ways to make a familiar impact.
Build in brainstorming or play time to explore multiple options. Time is a critical component to a creative practice, so explicitly including more free-thinking time in the brief’s timeline will help people think more expansively about solutions.
Over to you
What have you encountered in your experience with creative briefs? Anything you would add or remove from this list of suggestions? Any venting you want to do about briefs gone wrong? We’re here for it!
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