Hasta La Creative!

You could put the creative brief in the same category as old age. No one looks forward to it, but it’s better than the alternative. Creative briefs have been the fuel for great campaigns from “Got Milk” to Volkswagen’s “Drivers Wanted.” They also have been the whipping boy for unhappy creative teams desperate for inspiration. Account people defensively cling to them when clients trash brilliant concepts. And clients may sign them like free checks, forgetting that they’re launching teams of people on weeks of late nights and bad takeout meals.

To get any creative job done, you absolutely need a set of directions, and the brief fills in a lot of the basic information, but it can hardly guarantee success. The problem is that even the best brief leaves a huge uncharted void between the single compelling insight and the final work. At its worst, it can send a group of teams off in a hundred different directions.

I’m curious to discover how the creative brief can evolve and keep pace with all the other rapid innovations in the advertising industry. Why would we expect that a tool designed to create a pure advertising campaign would also work for more complex marketing campaigns that include social components, native advertising, a multitude of content types, and be distributed across paid, earned and owned media on a variety of devices?

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