Dear Baby Creatives,
The brief is not the enemy.
Is it restrictive, reductive, and occasionally written by someone who doesn’t fully understand exactly what creative does? Absolutely. But even that isn’t enough to make it the enemy. Worst-case scenario, it’s usually the comic-relief bumbling idiot. It stumbled around, tripped on a dog and fell into the beautiful cake you just baked — it was bumbling, not sabotage.
But most of the time, the brief isn’t an enemy or a comic-relief idiot — it’s a document full of information and requirements applicable to the creative task you’ve been given, and thus has no personality or intention.
In a more poetic sense, though, it’s a helpful guide full of important information that will help you understand, research, concept, and execute good creative work to solve the client’s problem. So here are a few reasons to tamp down your resentment when you’re presented with a detailed creative brief and not just handed a marker and a whiteboard and invited to go to town.
It’s restrictive and reductive.
It giveth and it taketh away. Because the opportunity to go nuts and creativity all over the place sounds great until you have an actual problem at hand and have no idea where to start. It’s the blank-page problem. It’s a wide, blue sky. It’s every option in the world, at your fingertips, and vapor lock as you try to figure out where to even start.
The brief turns your wide-open opportunity into a puzzle to solve. How do you sell whitening toothpaste when the brand voice is “introspective”? When an on-call plumbing service is looking for “sex appeal”? Your options narrow, and instead of having an empty blue sky, you have a jumping-off point. (And I just right now came up with a sexy campaign for on-call plumbers, so you know it’s legit.)
It shows you where the fences are, for greater ease of climbing over them when appropriate.
Now, this is a delicate exercise for a baby creative and should be attempted with supervision for (as I’ve been fond of blathering about) appropriate application of rule breakage. But the brief is one of the best sources of “why the rules are there” you’re likely to get for a given project, which can help you deliver quality creative output that might… evade them just a scooch.
And that’s emphasis on the quality and the creative, because it has to be both. But we, as creatives (even the old, jaded, and burnt-out among us) have a tendency to look at the guidance we’re given and see it like an electric fence — we get within a few feet of it and then stop when we feel the buzz of electricity.
But the really good shit isn’t found multiple feet away from the fence, and the fence isn’t electric, and sometimes the best shit is a couple of feet on the other side, and by going over there and getting it, you’re giving your client (and your team) something other creatives might not be able to. You just have to know where the fence is. And the brief will tell you that.
It tells you what the client needs (even if they’ve askedfor something else).
One of the greatest skills you’ll learn with time, experience, and exposure is mind-reading — which is to say, decoding what you’ve been given to understand what the problem really is and what the client really needs to solve it. Being able to read between the lines of a creative brief is one of the skills that will set you apart from other creatives as you progress in your career.
Sometimes a client doesn’t really understand the process, or even doesn’t really understand their own brand. They ask for something, and you just Know that what they need is really something kind of adjacent to that, and you’re able to produce creative that’s literally better than they might ever expect. The “reading between the lines” comes with time and practice, and “of a creative brief” is the way you practice.
Okay, sometimes the brief is the enemy.
Okay, yes, sometimes the brief really does hold you back. Maybe it’s not complete. (The number of CDs I’ve wanted to shake like an ’80s soap opera for handing me an inadequate brief…) Maybe it’s unclear or inaccurate. Maybe the client in question didn’t just not-understand things but thought they did understand things and spewed that Expertise all over the page.
It’s frustrating, it’s dispiriting, and it’s why God invented second concepts. The first concept follows the letter of the brief (to the extent that the brief has enough letters to follow). The second one lets you explore what could/should/might solve the problem at hand, with the freedom to maybe go a little out there and draw on instinct, knowledge, and experience (in progress ) to fill in the blanks and come up with something good.
You can look at a brief and see a ruthless adversary or a helpful creative tool, but if it’s the first one, you’re objectively wrong, because I said so. It’s the second one. Mostly, above all:
It’s a document full of information and requirements applicable to the creative task you’ve been given, and thus has no personality or intention.
So ease the hell up.
XOXO,
Caperton
Former baby copywriter, now wildly successful in the industry