One is the loneliest number
No one should ever write a creative brief alone. If you don’t believe me, listen to Jon Steel, author of Truth, Lies, and Advertising: The Art of Account Planning (whom I’ve quoted liberally on this blog): “I can say with complete confidence that the best briefs I have ever written have really been written by […]
Another exercise you can do anywhere
Practicing your creative brief writing skills is easier than you might think. In a previous post, I suggested that you could practice writing a brief by focusing on the single-minded proposition. Simply look around you, pick something like a chair or a colleague, and figure out its essence. That’s the equivalent of a single-minded proposition. […]
What President Obama might say about writing a creative brief
Whether you voted for him or not, President Obama changed the nature of campaigning in this country by doing something that anyone whose job it is to write a creative brief will understand. Barack Obama demonstrated a mastery at a public narrative that connected us to a core set of values we share about America […]
Which matters more: what a reader feels or thinks after seeing an ad?
Not all creative brief templates are created equal. Some ask the question, "What do we want the target audience to think after seeing the communication?" Some ask, "What do we want the target audience to feel after seeing the communication?" Some ask a combination of both, think and feel. Some don't bother asking either question, […]
Words
I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about writing. Today, I want to talk about something more fundamental: Words. I'm a writer, so words have special meaning for me. I get hung up on words. Sometimes a single word. Because when you change even one word, what can happen? You can completely change […]
Thoughts on writing the creative brief: Target audience
Isn't this just basic information here? The place where you describe who we're talking to? Unfortunately, too often, that's as inspiring as some brief writers care to get. This is where you can allow your writing to really soar. Where you don't have to be a brilliant writer to make a brilliantly inspiring impact on […]
How do you practice writing creative briefs when you barely have time to write creative briefs?
Good question. Tough question, too. It gets back to how you learned to write a brief in the first place. If you learned by doing, as I suspect most brief writers learned, the answer is, well, you practice by doing too. But that's a lame answer. There has to be a better way to sharpen […]
How versus what
Think of the creative brief as more than your way of elucidating the assignment for your creative team. Think of it as an opportunity to influence the creative results. When you do that, you realize how important your task is. And why the document deserves serious treatment. When you write an inspired creative brief, it's […]
Thoughts on writing the creative brief: the single-minded proposition
In an earlier post, I quoted John Hegarty on the subject of the brief as the first ad for a new project in the form of the proposition. Meaning the single-minded proposition (SMP). This little sentence, and it should be no more than one sentence, is perhaps the hardest group of words to write in […]
Alchemy is alive and well, if you believe
(A tip of my hat to my old friend Frank Quadflieg, EVP/Creative Growth Catalyst, at Bolin Marketing for inspiring this post.) The popular understanding of the word alchemy is the transformation from one substance, say stone, into another substance, usually gold. I'd say that's a pretty darn good definition of what a creative brief can […]
