Thread by @farrahbostic

Dear agency friends,
What are your unpopular opinions about creative briefs? I’m writing about some of mine, but I’d love to hear some of yours.
🎶 I have the honor to be your obedient servant,
F. Bos 🎶

Ok I’ll go first. I don’t think clients should see briefs and/or approve them. They’re written for creatives. If the creative team says the brief is useful, and it’s consistent with the client approved strategy, then it’s done. I also don’t think planners should write taglines.

https://twitter.com/farrahbostic/status/1135940192618123270

I think creative briefs are powder kegs. They can explode a creative team’s trust in a strategist, a clients’s trust in an agency, even when the brief is good, if the client doesn’t know how to see them, if they want briefs to read like a manifesto, or like an ad.

I think creative briefs are getting to be too long. I think they are too often short on insight (often just dressed-up platitudes) and long on useless “data” (aka dubious demographics).

I think creative briefs reflect our obsession with what’s cool at the expense of what is humane. Briefs ask “what’s the exciting possibility” but not “what’s the risk of negative externalities”.

Creatives have some opinions here, where the strategists at?

https://twitter.com/farrahbostic/status/1135940192618123270

Here’s one I don’t think I share, but maybe underpins a lot of tension between creative & strategy (and for that matter accounts): I think a lot of folks in agencies don’t think strategists are necessary. I think a lot of folks think strategy sucks the air out of creativity.

And then there’s this - I was once told that briefs exist to create a bottleneck, forcing clients into strategic agreement before the agency takes on the greater expense of creative development, derisking that expense through preemptive client buy-in.

Ok, my last few opinions about creative briefs. I think they’re essential for creative assignments… they are hard to do well, but do them well we must… they are too important to be just another account management deliverable… they deserve constructive feedback & collaboration.

I think creative briefs are compacts between strategists and creatives - a meeting of the minds on how to solve the client’s problem, an API for developing creative solutions, a fulcrum for leveraging smarts & creativity. They should build trust as much as they should inspire.

If briefs aren’t doing all that, a few things are possible: a creative brief isn’t necessary to the assignment; briefs are done pro forma, there’s no investment in or cultivation of real insight; disciplines are siloed & starved for resources/visibility across the process.

So thank you if you shared your perspective (and keep the line open, I’d love to hear more). I believe we all want to do good and effective work. Otherwise, god, what are we even doing.