I'm often conscious that my musings on brands and stuff can easily get a bit abstract and un-useful. All this talk of polyphonic brands and the tyranny of the big idea is fine if you're coffeeing with a bunch of smarty-pants planners but not much use if you're trying to get a campaign for a hard-nosed tyre retailer out the door and still get home in time for your child's birthday. Or something.
Anyway.
One of the regular emails I get is - what creative brief template do you use? And of course being a smarty-pants planner I tend to say that I don't believe in a standard template and it just leads to form-filing and while that's sort of true, if asked to write a brief I probably know what boxes I'd have, and how to fill them in. And anyway, there are other people out there, probably in a planning department of one who'd just like some help in what should go on a good creative brief. So I thought maybe we should try a wisdom of the crowds thing and try to build the ultimate, all-purpose, ready for anything, use-it-until-you've-learned-to-do-without-it creative brief template.
Last month's article about creative briefs created a flood of emails. Six people submitted samples, and more than 100 asked to see the results!
That leads me to the conclusion that everyone is struggling to create the perfect document, or at least one that can be used rather than tossed as soon as it's distributed.
I received a creative brief from Mary Baum, managing director of HerbertBaum Integrated Marketing in St. Louis, that seems to do the trick. It provides the right amount of information without turning the document into the Magna Carta.
Mary wrote me, "Here's a form that I'm told started at Ted Bates & Company and got to me via one of his AEs who had his own agency in St. Louis in the 1980s. So make sure you give credit to Dick Vinyard!"
Mary continues, "I've added one field to the form, but otherwise still use it today unchanged, and very often I let the client sign off on it before we start creating anything. On paper it's one page, but mostly these days it's an email and really should only go one screen below the fold."
MESSAGE STRATEGY
Client: The ABC company
Product: Heat-treated flanges
Project: Integrated web and direct mail campaign
Target audience: End-user department managers at companies with revenue of $500 million to $1 billion
Communications objective: Generate leads and some sales via web registration
Key benefit/net objective: Improve the durability of your product and get free stuff at our web sit
