The Brief Is the Product: What Leaders Get Wrong When They Hire a Creative Team

When creative work disappoints, the instinct is to blame the creative. Sometimes that is fair. More often the project was set up to struggle from the first conversation, because nobody agreed what success looked like.

These are the challenges we see most often with founders, marketers and leadership teams, and what tends to fix them.

Asking for a format instead of an outcome

We need a video. We need a website. We need a logo. Those are answers, not briefs. Start with the outcome you want, more bookings, a raise closed, a launch people talk about, and let the team propose the format. You might need less than you think, or something you hadn't considered.

Too many decision makers, too late

The most expensive feedback is the feedback that arrives at the end from someone who wasn't in the room at the start. Decide who signs off before work begins, and bring them in early. Three rounds of clear notes beat ten rounds of surprises.

Treating the brand as decoration

A brand isn't the colours on the slide. It is what people believe about you when you are not there. If the team doesn't know what you stand for, they will guess, and you will spend the project correcting the guesses.

Measuring the wrong thing

Likes are easy to count and easy to mistake for results. Agree up front how you will judge the work, and give it time to do its job before you change it.

Clear briefs make brave work possible. Vague briefs make safe work inevitable.

The good news

Every one of these is solved before a single frame is shot or a single page is designed. Spend an extra hour on the brief and you will save weeks on the back end. And if you are not sure what to ask for, say so. Working that out together is part of the job.