What A Good Brief Looks Like

If you keep getting work back that is not what you wanted, the problem is upstream of the person doing it.

A brief that says "make it look premium" produces a guess. The guess is wrong, you ask for changes, and three rounds later you have described what you wanted all along, in pieces, expensively.

Say what it is for

Not the format. The job.

"A carousel" is a format. "Something that gives a prospect enough confidence to book a call after they have seen our ad twice" is a job.

The person doing the work makes hundreds of small decisions, and every one of them is easier when they know what the piece has to achieve.

Say who it is for

Specific enough to picture. Not "small business owners." A builder doing four projects a year who has been burned by an agency before.

The audience decides the tone, the level of detail, the objections to address and the proof needed. Leave it out and you get something written for everyone, which lands with nobody.

Say what has to be in it

The non-negotiables. A specific claim, a legal line, a product name spelled a particular way, a number, a call to action.

Then say what must not be in it. This half is skipped constantly and it is where most revisions come from. Banned words, claims you cannot make, competitors you do not name, a topic that is off limits.

Show a reference

The fastest thing in any brief.

Send an example that does what you want and say which part. "The pacing of the first eight seconds." "The way the type sits over the image." "The tone of the second paragraph."

One reference with two specific notes beats a page of adjectives. Adjectives are interpreted. References are seen.

Give the raw material

Do not make them find it.

The photos, the transcript, the product details, the client's own words, the data. If the person has to go hunting for source material, they will either use the wrong thing or spend your money looking.

For anything with facts in it, say where the facts come from. Made-up detail in creative work is the failure mode that costs the most to fix.

Say what done looks like

The format, the dimensions, the length, the file type, the deadline, and who approves it.

The approver matters more than people think. Work that goes to one person and comes back, then goes to a second person and comes back differently, is a briefing problem rather than a quality problem.

Write the standard once

The first few briefs are long. After that they should be short, because most of the answer is the same every time.

Write down your brand rules, your tone, your banned words, your formats, your approval path. Now each brief is three lines plus the specifics, and the person already knows the other twenty answers.

That document is the difference between someone who needs you on every job and someone who can run.

Give feedback the same way

Scattered notes across three messages over two days turn a one-round change into four.

Review the whole thing. Write every note in one message. Be specific about what is wrong and, where you can, what would be right.

"I do not like it" is not feedback. "The opening is too slow, start on the third line" is.