When do you know you’ve written a good creative brief?
If you want to make money, invite your creative team to a poker game. You’ll win. Creatives have terrible poker faces. I know. I’m a former creative. When we have a good hand, it’s hard to hide it. That’s the way we are about most things in life. We wear our emotions on our faces, […]
The creative brief writer’s worst enemy.
We love to beat up on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, even LinkedIn, and the entirety of the internet for our ills. But there is a larger point not enough of us are willing to say or even think. Social media and the vast online swamp are not to blame. They are the symptoms. Without the smartphone, […]
What a 70-year-old stone mason taught me about teaching creative brief writing.
In the summer of 1979, I was living in Tampa, Florida between my junior and senior years at the University of Tampa. My uncle, who was a senior legal-eagle at The Shriners, landed a summer job for me at a swimming pool company owned by one of the Shriners’ biggest donors. I don’t mind sharing […]
Advertising creatives are not artists.
In my lifetime, I have known poets, novelists, a playwright, sculptors, painters, musicians, ballet and modern dancers, choreographers and a film-maker or two. Artists all. For a decade between the early 80s to the early 90s, I called myself a poet, more accurately a part-time poet. I read, wrote and taught poetry and published a […]
Why is there no list of the Best Creative Briefs of All Time?
If you’re a fan of the NFL and someone asked you to put together your Dream Team offensive line, you’d know who to pick, right? Anyone who plays Fantasy Football gets the exercise. Quarterback? Lots of greats to choose from: YA Tittle, Fran Tarkenton, Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady. Arguments would erupt over who’s the best, […]
Dave Trott says a creative brief is about thinking, not writing. Well, not quite.
With due respect to the legendary creative director and author, from whom I’m still eagerly awaiting his acceptance of my request to connect on LinkedIn, I think Mr. Trott is half right. A creative brief is absolutely about thinking. But writing is not unimportant. In fact, I’d say a great creative brief is equal parts […]
Myths about creative briefs (they’re not what you think).
Creative briefs were “invented” if that’s the word a long time ago. Some credit the arrival of account planning in the mid-1960s, but I think the brief, in one form or another, probably existed long before then. And with any history comes mythology, or in 21st century parlance, misinformation. At the risk of giving them […]
What Dr. Seuss can teach brief writers.
How many words and phrases can you think of to express “simplicity”? Here are a few that come immediately to mind: KISS Occam’s Razor I love this one from Albert Einstein, and I’ve written about it before: “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.” Less is more. “Simplicity is […]
The lazy way to write a target-audience description.
Bullets should be banned. Sorry, gun fans, I don’t mean ammo. I mean those pesky black dots that show up on creative briefs everywhere. Like this: The bullets are usually followed by useless acronyms and marketing-speak such as HHI, 24-49, and other lingo. This is not thinking, it’s rote nonsense. Remember what Dave Trott said: […]
How much does an idea cost?
I use real briefs when I teach my workshops on writing creative briefs. Not blank templates, but completed briefs. Not case studies, but real working briefs. Among the questions I ask attendees is this: What’s missing from the briefs they review in my workbook? I know the answer before I ask it, of course, and […]
