How to Write an Actionable Creative Brief

Marketers looking to motivate and get the best work from their creative partners, both in-house or agency, need to make sure their briefs are optimized for a creative audience. 

Here are some tips to help make your brief more easily digestible by even the most particular of creative teams.

Get to the point early

Providing in-depth details about audience research or product-market fit may not be the best use of your time when meeting with creatives. Remember this is a creative brief, not a strategy brief or a PRD. You can provide a link to those details, speak to them in your kickoff, or say you’re open to questions about the who/why of it all, but keep the brief focused on the actual creative request. 

Provide an accurate count of deliverables

Number of deliverables is a key measure of project size and the bandwidth required to tackle it. Avoid presenting the work as a smaller task than it really is.  

I’ve been in kickoffs where the project initiator says something like, “It’s a small ask. I just need two display ads…in 6 different sizes.” Well, to a designer that’s actually 12 ads. Nobody falls for this kind of creative accounting. Being up front about the true size of the project is not only critical for building an accurate schedule, but it goes a long way in building trust between you and your creative team.

State the creative objective of the work as well as the business objective

While the overall business objective of the project may be straightforward, like drive more sign ups or increase awareness by 10%, your creative team can benefit from more specific creative goals. This is where you can provide input as to what you want a consumer to feel or think when they engage with the creative work. 

Is it aspirational or practical? Should the customer feel confident or concerned? Including some scent of emotional tone is helpful guidance, but proceed carefully. You’ll see in the next section that getting too specific can be dangerous.

Don’t be too prescriptive

This is absolutely where you can lose the cooperation of your creative team. Providing precise layout expectations, photography selections, pre-written taglines, or anything that could be deemed a part of the creative output is typically seen as marketing overreach. 

Overly prescriptive direction is interpreted by writers and designers as a lack of trust in them and a lack of respect for the creative discipline. The last thing you want is a creative to feel like a mere order taker who’s only there to execute some marketers vision. Just as you want them to treat you as the SME of the marketing strategy, you in turn need to remember they are the SMEs when it comes to the creative. 

Offering some general ideas of what you expect is fine and most likely welcome, however it’s beneficial to present them as simply examples or conversation starters and not as concrete directions.  

Keep the the conversation open

A brief should never be the kind of document that’s lobbed over the fence to the creative team. It’s helpful to think of it as a working draft until you present it and get buy-in from your partners. Staying flexible and open to negotiating timelines, deliverables, and even fine tuning strategy builds goodwill. As the brief writer, you set the tone for the project. Leading with a gesture that embraces collaboration, as opposed to a dictatorial “my way or the highway” approach, is going to get creatives on your side and eager with you on your projects.