Write an Invitation to Your Muse
By: Nihan Kucukural
Tags: Creativity, Advertising, Writing, Creative Brief, Copywriting

The Magical Tool of Advertising: The Creative Brief

The advertising industry has developed systems and routines for creativity. The creative brief is the most important tool agencies use to ensure creativity. Who says creativity doesn’t have a recipe?

What is it?

A creative brief is a document that has all the information needed to create an ad. It serves more than one purpose. First of all, it makes sure that both the client and the agency agree on what they want. With the written brief, you can guarantee that everyone is on the same page! But more importantly, the brief provides the creative teams with a road map. Creatives can’t start working without a brief.

Sometimes I hear people say, “I have a great idea for an ad for McDonald’s!” That’s great; good luck with that! You might have the most brilliant idea, but that’s not how advertising works. It has to start with McDonald’s. They should say, “I have this new product/strategy/message I want to communicate with this target audience.” The agency listens to McDonald’s and writes down a creative brief. McDonald’s reads and revises the brief, then approves it. Only then do the creatives at the agency get the assignment and begin scratching their heads.

So, no creative brief, no ad. In this Forbes article, Will Burns calls the creative brief “the most sacred of sacred ad documents.”

How does it do its magic?

A creative brief does not only forward information to the creatives. It also inspires and motivates them to produce their most creative work by luring in their muse!

Sometimes the creatives already know all the information necessary. But they still need to know what a certain ad will be about. They also need to grasp the essence of this communication, get a specific feeling of it. You know how they say, “sell the sizzle, not the sausage.” They need to learn what the sizzle in this context is.

A great creative brief is short. It is built around one simple and clear idea or claim. Yet it also includes carefully chosen details supporting the central idea. It also appeals to the senses and creates an emotion about the subject matter.

It takes good decision-making and sacrifices to not fill the brief with relevant and irrelevant facts. When the creatives read it, the work feels easy. Their minds begin bubbling up with possibilities, energized, and inspired. A brief works like a writing prompt.

After I saw good briefs, I realized that the ad I saw in the newspaper had served as a creative brief for me. It made my fingers itchy and pushed me to write without thinking too much.

What does a brief include?

In a brief, you typically find information including:

Statements about the brand, its values, and market positioning,

Who the target audience is,

What the project is trying to communicate,

What they offer the audience and what behavior change they expect from them in return,

Channels of communication,

The tone of voice,

Who else is in the market, etc.

Yet, all these have one purpose: to support the main message. The information is backed by research about the market, the target audience, and the product. Again, only the most relevant findings of the research — that supports the message — is used in the brief.

Companies spend thousands of dollars on research. They use this research to shape their overall strategies as well as individual creative briefs. The research about the target audiences influences how brands communicate with them.

Researchers also collect user insights. For instance, a toothpaste user in a focus group mentions that they check their teeth’s cleanliness by running their tongue over them. The account executives write about this in the brief. The creative team later might use this insight in a TV script. This process helps the creatives visualize the consumer’s experience. They empathize with the consumers and feel their emotions. This inspires and prepares their minds to create interesting, attention-grabbing stories.

The creative brief is the first step of the creative process

When we say creative brief, many people think this means a document for creative people. It doesn’t have to be creative in itself. In fact, a good creative brief is creative like poetry. It’s the first step of the creative process. At DDB, they called this a springboard. It’s a brief that gives the creatives a push in the right direction to achieve a higher level of creativity.

When the brief is not creative and made of concrete facts, it feels like concrete ground rather than a springboard to jump on. It doesn’t spark creativity. The creatives end up producing mediocre results. With limited time and energy, they can only take one creative step. The second step, the real creative process that puts you in flow, rarely happens.

“This should have been the brief!”

As a junior copywriter, when I wrote a boring ad, my senior writer would look at it and say, “This should have been the brief!” and blame the account team for not writing a creative brief but giving us the dry facts.

And if we presented such a draft to our director, or worse, the client, they would feel it wasn’t finished. They would feel the urge to complete it themselves by suggesting creative ideas, writing headlines. They would switch roles and take over the second step of the creative process. It would look like we, the creatives, hadn’t done our job. And this wouldn’t be far from the truth. We would have only done the account executive’s job, not our own.

But it was a different story when we received well-written, motivating, and inspiring briefs. It would be much easier to sit down and start generating great ideas. The muse couldn’t wait to be with us!

I am not going to lie by saying that my life at DDB turned out to be all roses because of creative briefs. I still had the writer’s blocks. Insecurities, headaches, heartaches, and stomach aches are part of being creative. But I learned to use the briefs to get to the heart of the matter. I was able to generate at least a few viable ideas for a project. I wrote acceptable headlines and always met the deadlines. I was never fired from DDB!

Can we use this ‘magic’ to inspire ourselves in content creation?

As writers, we can write a brief to clear our heads about our ideas and understand our main idea. This way, we can stay on the course and not let our research distract us.

The best way to do this is to prepare a basic template for your own briefs. It could include questions like these:

1. What am I going to write about? What’s the topic of my story?

2. What am I trying to say? What’s the main message of the story?

3. Who are my readers?

4. What are my readers thinking/doing about this topic right now, and what do I want them to think/do instead?

5. What do I promise them if they think/do this?

6. Who am I, what is my tone of voice saying this? (Am I serious, funny, clever, sarcastic, warm, understanding, or emotional?)

Then, answer your questions in a clear and simple way. Make sure they are consistent with each other. They should come together nicely around a simple idea, and touch an emotion.

Once written, if possible, let your brief sit for a few days, move on to other projects. Then come back and read it with fresh eyes. Does it inspire you? Does it prompt you to write? Do your fingers start itching? In that case, it was worth the try!