Brief Your Creative Team With Inspiration, Not Just Information

One of our first BETA agencies, White Rhino Advertising, used Ideasicleˣ and said “We got more ideas in a day than we typically get in a week with the traditional method.” There are many reasons that ideas happen quickly and exponentially on the Ideasicleˣ platform, but one of the most important is the degree to which the creative brief inspires the team.

Let’s stop what we’re doing and talk about how to inspire your teams with a creative brief, be they Ideasicleˣ teams or your own.

Everything is never inspiring. But something might be.

The most inspiring moments in history were not drawn-out events. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech lasted only 16 minutes, but was one of the most important and memorable speeches of the last 100 years.

Or Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.” It took him 2 minutes and 22 seconds to deliver that genius collection of carefully crafted words. About the same amount of time as one of the most famous and most covered songs of all time, “Yesterday,” by the Beatles, which times out at a mere 2:06.

A great creative brief requires a heavy dose of respect for the following quote from the philosopher Blaise Pascal: "I have made this letter longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter." - "Lettres provinciales," letter 16, 1657.

Mr. Pascal, you nailed it, my friend. Inspiration takes more time and fewer words.

The inspirational creative brief.

Here are a few tips to inspire your teams of freelancers with a shot of inspiration through your creative brief. If you have ideas for more, please post in the comments section below:

1. The brief is a starting point, not the answer.

Who wants to work on an assignment where the client thinks they’ve already got the answer in the brief? That’s not inspiring. Instead have a provocative “What is the problem to be solved?” section because creative people love solving problems. I always start my answer to this section with “How do we…?” and make it a question that you want the teams to answer.

2. Zero redundancy.

The creative brief should be one solid story with zero redundancy across any of the sections. Means you’ll have to make some choices on where THAT important point best resides, but only put it there or Mr. Pascal make come after you.

3. One page and no more.

I don’t care how complex an assignment is, if you can’t get it down to one page then you’re not finished. A creative person will have a much better mental attitude if the brief is digestible. One page, inspiring. Two pages or more, not inspiring.

4. Just enough support to be dangerous.

Yes, you will need support points (or “reasons to believe”) for the single claim made in the brief. But think them through and only put the three most compelling points in the brief. You can communicate the others later if you must, once the team has been inspired to give birth to their big ideas. They don’t need all of the support points to get to the big idea.

5. Connect the different sections of the brief.

Related to #2 above (Zero Redundancy), it’s important that each section of the brief build upon the last. For example, the single most important claim should resolve the tension built in the previous sections (problem, target, key insight). And the support points should be written to riff off the single most important claim. Even the target audience section can tee up the need that the brand/product/service satisfies. And so on. Success on this front will mean you have a narrative from beginning to end. Stories are inspiring.

6. Swear and shit.

The creative brief is not designed to inspire clients (though it may), it’s designed to inspire creative people. Creative people don’t talk marketing-speak, and the good ones treat marketing-speak like it's kryptonite. Speak in normal language, not client language, and you’re more likely to inspire.

7. Remember creative people tend to be graphically inclined.

Creative people work within a graphically perfect world all day long. Images sized perfectly, type kerned exquisitely, copy written efficiently. So there’s no better way to squash inspiration than to violate these simple graphic standards when laying out the brief. An old colleague of mine from my Mullen days, Paul Laffy, who is a veteran art director, posted this on his Facebook page today: “When ad agencies have templated briefs, and people writing in them tend to accidentally bump a box off-center, or write a long paragraph and leave one word on its own line (referred to as a ‘runt’), or can't fit the paragraph in the box made for it, I just can't get past those things. It drives me nuts and as a result I take longer than usual to absorb the brief.” So for max inspiration, make the brief look as good as it sounds.

Think of it this way. Information is the clay and inspiration is what you do with it. Here are two versions of a creative brief template you are welcome to steal and make your own (click to download):

By the way, the briefs are green for a reason. A study out of the University of Munich found that when people see a flash of green prior to a creative exercise they are more creative. So we figured what the hell? Here’s a link to that study.

At Ideasicleˣ we enable you to post a brief and accompanying video.

Because our process is entirely virtual we make it easy for customers to brief their teams by uploading a one-page creative brief pdf and an accompanying head-shot video where the customer can explain the brief from top to bottom. The team, once finalized, see both the pdf and the video at the top of the Idea Stream and can immediately start posting ideas. The briefing materials remain up there during the entire project in case anyone needs a refresher.

We’ll do another post in the near future about creating an inspirational briefing video. But I hope this post will help you make your briefs full of just the right information to make them full of inspiration.