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Rising Star
I’d say actual creative briefs, in essence — surfacing an insight about a target audience as the launchpad for a creative idea — no.
But contemporary media plans and deliverables lists have exploded and I guess that reverse engineers a lot of complexity into the brief.
Like, now when you stress test a creative idea, you have to make sure you’re clear on how it can show up in a bazillion different channels, from mass to social to experiential to PR to owned to influencer to media partnership placements and so on. Whereas back then, the media plans for every campaign weren’t so insanely fragmented.
Rising Star
To say nothing of the fact that timelines and budgets have also shrunk down, which makes things trickier in so many ways.
Pro
Yes, full stop. The KPIs, how we measure data, reach, etc etc. There are “formulas” now that make “stronger” or “better performing” materials but the creative is somehow worse(???). We didn’t have this 20 years ago. Even if you do sell an idea through, getting it through legal has never been more impossible. These ideas need to check like 25 boxes and clients need a crystal ball to see if the juice is worth the squeeze, and the media spend includes like 10 things we need, 20 things we didn’t ask for, and also we have to force fit the idea into 10 other random ad placements like Pinterest carousels with a shopping cart attached or a Netflix pause ad.
Anyways. I’m tired.
An 8-page brief is not brief.
When I first started, it was a page with a goal, market audience, insight, strategy, and deliverables.
Now it's a deck with must-haves, work competitors have done, "thought starters" from the client (aka more must-haves), and basically a how-to guide on what client wants made.
Considering every brief I see now is 15 pages of strategic nonsense and client “must haves”,
Yes.
But it’s been that way for a while