E85: A conversation with Tim Brunelle, who could be a third Brief Bros.
Airs September 28, 2022 This week, Henry Gomez and I are joined by another great creative from the Twin Cities, Tim Brunelle. Tim is a writer, creative director, strategist, leader and a fellow advocate for creative briefs. Tim came to our attention from our friend Mark Jenson, lecturer at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School […]
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, […]
E83: Reviewing a creative brief by Crispin Porter Bogusky
Airs September 14, 2022 This week, Henry Gomez and I try something new and different: we share with you a real creative brief by a real ad agency. So we review both the brief itself and one TV spot that came from the brief. The agency is Crispin Porter Bogusky, a powerhouse creative shop whose […]
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 […]
