Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

One of the ben­e­fits of work­ing as a cre­ative free­lancer for seven years is I got to see how dif­fer­ent agen­cies brief their clients and cre­ative teams on how they’re plan­ning to achieve adver­tis­ing goals. Ide­ally, all this infor­ma­tion is boiled down in a mag­i­cal doc­u­ment called the cre­ative strat­egy. In it’s best form, every­thing the client needs to approve the work and every­thing the cre­ative team needs to exe­cute the adver­tis­ing should be dis­tilled into a suc­cinct, one page document.

Many agen­cies strug­gle with get­ting this right and many do it bril­liantly. And most cer­tainly, there are a lot of brand man­agers, account exec­u­tives and plan­ners who don’t have a firm grasp on what a cre­ative team needs to turn their insights into bril­liant work. So I write this with the best of inten­tions and hope this helps some­one out there. And in the least, it lets a few cre­atives know what they should be get­ting from their strat­egy team.

Each para­graph rep­re­sents a head­ing that should be writ­ten in a sen­tence or two — any longer and it means the strat­egy isn’t tight enough yet. The think­ing is based on an old Bill Bern­bach doc­u­ment that was handed down to me and has been refined over the years — not that I have the right to refine mas­ter, but I have done it anyway.

Objec­tive – This is not a litany of all the prob­lems the mar­ket­ing depart­ment, the sales depart­ment and the exec­u­tives tell the account team they have. An adver­tis­ing cam­paign, whether done in print, TV or the Web should be focused on one single-minded prob­lem that is solv­able with adver­tis­ing.  If it is not, well adver­tis­ing prob­a­bly isn’t the best solu­tion. The objec­tive is one sim­ple sen­tence with­out com­pound direct objects. Don’t con­fuse this with a mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions plan. KISS.

A lot of briefs start out with “why are we adver­tis­ing? or “back­ground.” That’s fine, but these topics/headings often digresses and can end up con­fus­ing the objective.

Tar­get: Back in the day of Bern­bach this was a pretty sim­ple answer. You were adver­tis­ing to either mom, dad, grandma or junior. These days, plan­ners and researchers are get­ting well past demo­graph­ics and psy­hco­graph­ics to techno­graph­ics and even some new fan­gled thing called social­grahics. Keep this a sim­ple as pos­si­ble while still explain­ing who this per­son is. As com­pli­cated as peo­ple are, their moti­va­tions are still pretty simple.

Cur­rent per­cep­tion: How does the tar­get feel about the brand or prod­uct you are adver­tis­ing? Don’t com­pli­cate this and the above topic with psy­cho bab­ble. You can put the bab­ble in a sup­port­ing doc­u­ment if you really think it’s nec­es­sary and will help the cre­ative team.

Unique sell­ing posi­tion or key ben­e­fit: Not every prod­uct has a unique sell­ing posi­tion (a sub­ject for another post) but every cre­ative strat­egy should include a key ben­e­fit. This is the sin­gle, best rea­son why some­one would want to buy your prod­uct. If there isn’t one, you haven’t thought hard enough. Again, this should be a clear sin­gu­lar state­ment of fact.

Sup­port­ing points or “rea­sons why”: This is why a cus­tomer should believe the the key ben­e­fit. If it doesn’t sup­port the above state­ment it is irrel­e­vant and only serves to muddy your logic.

Sin­gle Sen­tence: This is stated for the con­sumers per­spec­tive and describes what the con­sumer should say to them­selves after read­ing or watch­ing your adver­tis­ing. “I should buy acme brand corn­flakes because they have more fiber.” While it may seem like a sim­ple restate­ment of the key ben­e­fit it actu­ally servers two pur­poses. It helps the strat­egy writer see if their key ben­e­fit sounds smart or ridicu­lous stated from the consumer’s per­spec­tive and gives the cre­ative team a dif­fer­ent win­dow on what the adver­tis­ing is sup­posed to do.

Media: What media is the work going to run in, on, will be built for or be broad­cast on. I know it’s a new age, but sim­ply list it out here – cre­ate a sup­port­ing doc­u­ment if you must.

Manda­to­ries: This is where you tell your team if there’s a legal rea­son you have to include an FHA logo on the work, a copy­right line, a dis­claimer or you can’t use cer­tain word with­out being sued.

This for­mula is decep­tively short and sim­ple but it’s not always easy to exe­cute. If the writer does a good job on this every­thing that fol­lows has a bet­ter chance of succeeding.

Account peo­ple, you may not know it, but you need this doc­u­ment to be smartly devel­oped as much as your cre­ative teams does. The bet­ter this is writ­ten and dis­cussed with your client, the bet­ter the process of get­ting the client to sign off on the brief will be, the eas­ier exe­cut­ing the work will be, and the more fun the sell­ing the prod­uct will be.

ed note: This isn’t exactly the way we do it at Kil­gan­non (but not way off) and reflects my opin­ion only.