Tips for writing better briefs

At our IHALC Breakfast Briefing, Wunderman Thompson Strategy Director Will Humphrey shared his 20 secrets for writing better briefs

So many of our discussions this year have centred on the importance of briefing and the multitude of problems that can stem from briefs that fall down on such issues as process, clarity or brevity. Which is why we chose the subject for our first IHALC Breakfast Briefing.

The breakfast, supported by our partners, Adobe Workfront, took place at Soho’s Union Club on Wednesday December 8. To kick things off, our speaker, Wunderman Thompson Strategy Director Will Humphrey gave a brilliant overview of his secrets for writing better briefs.

Will’s 20 tips (see below) covered a huge amount of ground but, for in-house leaders, a few points stood out.

First, good briefs take time. While recognising the constraints that in-house teams work under, Will recommended setting aside two days to write a brief for a major project. That would be a challenge for many, but if you are really going to write something that draws on the available research, defines the problem at hand and survives the crucial ‘overnight test’ (ie sleep on it and see if it still makes sense it the morning), you can’t just dash it off in an hour.

Second, briefs need to be clear on what kind of problem they are trying to solve. Will talked about the differences between brand briefs (solving a ‘brand problem’ such as shifting historic perception), comms or experience briefs (for example, communicating to customers when your website is failing to cope with demand) and briefs that try to solve a business problem (eg when your distribution is poor).

Third, the importance of sharing briefs in development with stakeholders in order to get their buy-in and make sure your approach is on the right lines. This is particularly important in-house, when there are so many different departments involved.

After Will finished, we broke into smaller groups to discuss everyone’s briefing challenges and their responses to Will’s suggestions. WDC partner John Owen, who led one group, picks out the following insights from his table:

1) Briefing the problem not the solution
All agreed this is essential to getting the best work. The missing piece for many was not that they don’t present a problem but that they don’t dissect the problem in advance of the briefing. Building on the Einstein quote about spending 55 mins thinking about the problem and 5 mins on the solution, they agreed this was something their teams needed to get better at. Key to this is open discussion. And the enemy of all of this is allowing time pressure to prevent you from thinking and debating sufficiently - leading to false economies, since a poor brief often causes far too much time to be spent in creative development.

2) Surfacing what the brief owner / key stakeholders have in mind
One of the perils of creative development is that the ‘client’ has a particular output in mind, but can’t or doesn’t choose to articulate it, leading to time spent creating something that doesn’t match expectations. The best approach is to address this head on at the start of the brief writing process - allowing time to explore why this output is desired, to challenge it if appropriate and to agree how to approach the brief in light of this conversation. Sometimes, really prescriptive notions do need to be challenged, particularly if the brief is a strategic and creative one. But it also helps to have guardrails - in the form of executional guidelines, such as ‘show me a brand world’. In many respects, the tighter these guardrails are, the better the brief - as Will said in his talk, most creatives like ‘the freedom of a tight brief’.

3) Defining your audience as a mindset rather than by age group or demographic
Everyone agreed that it is essential to have clear agreement and definition of the primary audience. Often, there are multiple audiences to cater for in the real world, who may span ages, demographics, genders, ethnicities and all other traditional criteria. Will spoke about psychographics being more useful that any of these, and the group agreed that audiences are often better defined by reference to a unifying mindset. Critically, this enables different markets, channel and product owners to buy into something together, particularly if the mindset in question has been commercially validated - i.e. shown to be consistent with the desired purchase behaviour. This is where intelligent use of data and insight is so important.

4) Be single-minded 
The art of brief writing involves sacrifice. Briefs which try to appeal too broadly or to say too much will likely result in less effective work. Everyone agreed that a useful mantra for brief writing might be ‘Do One Thing Well’. We discussed how this type of focus can often enable more distinctive and memorable work, which tends also to generate a halo effect - meaning it impacts people beyond the core audience in ways that are not strictly related to the campaign message. Which is why really creative loyalty campaigns can often drive new subscribers, or why advertising a luxury car in a highly seductive way causes people who could never afford it to buy a hatchback from the same car brand. Getting stakeholders to understand this point remains a key battle.

With teams in attendance from the likes of The Body Shop, LEGO, Camelot, Macmillan Cancer Support, Sightsavers and Calvin Klein, the round table sessions were an invaluable opportunity to share knowledge and best practice - which is at the heart of everything we do at IHALC. There was too much ground covered to include everything here but Will has kindly offered to share his presentation – if anyone would like it, please email me.

Look out for more Breakfast Briefings from IHALC in the year ahead.

The In-House Agency Leaders Club was founded by WDC partners Nicky Russell, John Owen and Jim Hubbard and by ex-Creative Review Editor Patrick Burgoyne as a community for those working in-house to learn from and support one another. We run regular events, both in-person and online. Join us on LinkedIn here

WDC helps businesses transform marketing and creative operations to get better quality, more effective work, at less cost and with less pain. Its clients include BBC Creative, ASOS, The Body Shop and Specsavers. Find out more about their work here