Briefing

The briefing is the document and the conversation with which a client sets creative or strategic work in motion, and it is where most marketing fails before it starts. A good brief is singular and sharp: one problem, one audience, one desired change in behaviour or memory, the hard constraints, and the evidence all of it rests on. Practice suffers the reverse: piles of context without choices, objectives in the plural, and strategy delegated to the agency. The test is simple: can the maker retell from the brief what must be different if the work succeeds? If not, it is not a brief but a dossier.

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