Why A Good Brief Leads To Good Creative

+ The brief. It's a creative person's bane, but also their best friend. It's a document that provides creative marching orders. And the better it is, the better the creative. You'll find a variety of briefs used at different agencies. Most times the agencies try to have their briefs fit their business philosophies.

But when it all comes down to it, here's what we need to know:
- What is the goal? (Sell more widgets, introduce a new widget, etc)
- Who are we talking to? (Males, 18-34 into knitting and lacrosse)
- What is the 1 key message? (Widgets improve your life)
- What are the support points? (Widgets make you sexy, Widgets save 90% of lives, etc)
- Timeline (When is it due?)

Anything more than that, like media/budget/mandatory items, are a nice to have. Helpful and useful but not always needed. It also depends on the project; a website redesign will require quite a bit more info than a pure conceptual project.

Where do you go from there? Good creative knows to follow the brief. Great creative takes what's in the brief and spins the key message to make it relevant to audience. It's how we weave our gossamer web of creativity, threading strategy and problem solving into the tapestry of our work. Creatives need facts to start this process. Good creatives get it. Great creatives crave it and can't start working without it.