A creative brief is a document that explains in detail about a project to the creative team, ad agency, or designer to design effective ad campaign. It acts as a blueprint that guides creative team on how to best reach the ad campaign’s stated goals.
In other words, a creative brief is a short one-two page document outlining the strategy for a creative ad campaign. The creative brief is usually created by the account manager in close consultation with the client.
The creative brief also serves as a document of communication between client and agency as to the campaign objective, points of differentiation, and media channels that will be used to reach the target audience. When the client signs off on the brief, it gives the creative team the green light to start the concept phase for ad development.
Most creative briefs include the following:
- Communication objectives
- Creative strategy
- What is the product offering?
- Market segment/ Business segment
- Identified target audiences
- Attribute/benefit/emotional connection to the brand
- Key messages
- Competitive situation
- Media strategy
- Budget
Importance of Creative Brief
- Understand client’s objectives: Although the primary benefit of a creative brief is the synthesizing key information in a single place. It will enable a more comprehensive understanding of the client’s objective and better determine how you can work on it to achieve them.
- Provides Database: A strong creative brief not only include client’s product, context and objective. It also includes client’s a vision describing what the clients wants, requires, and needs. It is needed to inform all stakeholders from start to finish.
- Inspiration and confidence to employees: Creative brief being a well shaped and thoughtful document could help sparks ideas among employees of ad agency. It can also be helpful as a means to provide confidence to employees who read it.
- Provide information to all: The account manager, creative directors, designers and copywriters are involved in the preparing the ad campaign. Everyone is not going to be involved with every client meeting. The creative brief is an easy way to provide information to all. So it’s valuable to have a short, easy to read, single place that accumulates all the relevant information.
- A Reviewable and recorded document: After the ad campaign is completed, the creative brief still maintains value. It can be useful when working on similar projects or clients in future. It can be a reminder of what we did before, and provide insight into what might be needed to ensure a similar success going forward.
