Make it brief

Recently, a bunch of agency strategy planners got together in San Francisco to discuss…well…in their words

In a time when the world belongs to brands and people that do things, rather than talk about them, we thought it might be time for a conference where we get our hands dirty and learn how to make stuff.

Well, it seems they did some of that stuff, I don’t really know though, I wasn’t there. I only got to look at some of the awesome presentations that were made.

Such as…

And…

And…

One of the most interesting things they did at the conference (and the thing that alerted me to it in the first place) was taking a critical look at the tools we use as planners. Two of the things I was most happy to see on the list were propositions and the creative brief.

For a long time I’ve advocated for a view of the behavioural path in what I do which kind of leaves the door open for either no brief, or many briefs, or at least many propositions representing the many points on the behavioural path. None of those options seem ideal. No brief leaves the creative team in no-man’s land with only a vague idea of where to go, many briefs or many propositions is often too onerous or prescriptive and stifles the creative juices.

Most of the time due to agency mechanics, I’ve needed to work with the traditional brief approach because despite all of that, it seems that almost everyone I’ve worked with (bar some brilliant creatives and planners) have bought the farm when it comes to briefs. The brief is “the bible of the agency” I’ve heard it said. I keep replying “a brief is a process not a document”, but that seems to fall on deaf ears most of the time. It seems people have trouble getting their head around the fact that at some time in history the brief was invented, and it was invented in a time where the media landscape and the prevailing theories about human cognition, motivation, and behaviour were vastly different. That being so, there is a good case for re-working the way we think about generating behaviour through our work.

I’ve been catching up on Mark Earls’ 2002 book, the brilliant Welcome to the Creative Age – Bananas, Business and the Death of Marketing (recommended by the lovely Ilona Levchenko from Clemenger BBDO, Melbourne). I wish everyone I worked with had read it. He goes into a reasonable level of detail about what drives behaviour (clue: it’s not attitudes). And he advocates a more team-based iterative and intuitive approach to developing the creative product. He leaves aside tedious brand definitions, control structures, and predictive techniques and using an intuitive approach to developing the creative direction using what he calls purpose-ideas, and interventions. I won’t go into detail about what they are – buy the book. It suffices to say that his approach feels a lot better than the sausage-machine approach of the traditional brief.

How have you approached re-visiting your agencies’ approach to creative briefing?