A common thread
After more than 20 years in the creative industry, I must have worked on hundreds of creative projects, and therefore, have seen hundreds of creative briefs.
While projects that I worked on in the early part of my career had clear briefs, some of my more recent projects didn’t start with one. As I’ve gotten more senior beyond the marketing realm, so did the clients that I would work with—some of them are now CEOs—and briefs became more vague and less clear.
Even in those instances where there was no clear brief at the start of the project, there was a pivotal moment somewhere in the project that made a key difference in shaping the idea. Those pivotal moments came in the form of insightful and astute directives from someone at the top, or someone close to it.
If there is a common thread among the work that I’m most proud of, it is the correlation between the brief, or that pivotal moment, and the work.
Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
A creative brief is one of those important yet elusive artifacts in a creative process.
It’s important in that it’s a simple document that outlines the goals and objectives of a given project and is supposed to get everyone on the same page. I emphasize “supposed to” because it doesn’t always work that way.
However, briefs often become less meaningful when we don’t stick to them. This happens more often than it should as we’ve become more accustomed to making changes just because we can. Digital made numerous aspects of our work process more convenient over the last two decades but it also has made us less committed to decisions along the way. It’s obvious in hindsight but making changes in digital is much easier.
Here’s a story that highlights the mental shift that Corporate America has made in the last few decades. Creative functions within various industries have seen a profound impact of digital technologies. Digital is removing the barrier to making things. That’s good and bad.
When the renowned graphic designer Paula Scher worked at CBS Records in the 1970s, her album cover department had 35 people and produced about 150 covers a year. Making a cover was manual and laborious, taking weeks. Associated constituents knew as much. Once the design was approved, it was approved.
But once digital made the process much more malleable, the word “final” lost its meaning.
In the 1990s, the advancement of digital tools made the process much faster. One designer alone could create a cover just in days. By the 2010s, the same department had 100 people. But they still only produced 150 covers a year.
Three times as many people were producing the same volume of work, resulting in each person being less productive.
“What are all these people doing?” Scher asked the manager of the department. He didn’t know what she was talking about, she says. Soon, she realized what had happened.
New digital technologies made designing and editing easier and faster. That also meant decision-makers became less decisive and managers less respectful of processes. Executives started to change their minds. More people got involved. They had more feedback. And so on.
That led to the design department having more people making more changes. They were busy making changes after changes.
This story is just about the process of making album covers where the output is defined and needs to fit into a box (pun intended). Imagine this story for much more complicated projects like building a digital product.
We all thought digital made us more productive and processes more efficient. Not so.
Having a clear brief becomes that much more imperative now that the cost of executions is getting cheaper by the day.
Brief in a nutshell
Brief templates tend to get passed on from one strategist to another, and from one agency to others as those strategists switch jobs. Those templates are different versions of, more or less, the same thing.
There are many resources available out there but I will share our version that we use at my company. Project briefs, by nature, contain a lot of information. They do often get used as a crutch or worse, a way to cover our asses. That is, pack the brief with as much information and many wishes as possible for a given project so that we can refer back to them to say “We told you so.”
In the business context, this is understandable and even excusable. That does not mean, however, that those briefs will help create better work and outputs.
The kind of briefs I am focusing on here are creative briefs. Briefs that are meant to inspire creatives to come up with fresh, unexpected, yet smart ideas.
One clarification here, however. There are creative briefs for communication or marketing assignments and briefs for product or service development. The goal of a communication or marketing assignment is to elicit an emotional reaction from the audience whereas that of product or service development is to create something useful that users will want to adopt. Nuances can sometimes be subtle but we do need to be aware.
Good briefs, just as good ideas, are simple, easy to understand, and easy to remember.
We call our brief template “The brief in a nutshell,” courtesy of Emma Greenwood, I&CO’s strategy director who says she got this from her former boss at another company. I’m not certain whether they created it or it was passed onto them by someone else. See above.
“Get <someone> Who <is or does ___> To <do ___> By <doing ___>.”
As you can see here, by filling out the blanks in this brief, we’ll end up with one sentence that captures the most important essence and intended actions we hope to achieve.
Brief briefs
Having said all of this, the best briefs I’ve been given are even more brief than a brief in a nutshell. While some of them were official directives while others were off-the-cuff comments that happened to provide what I referred to earlier as pivotal moments.
Let me share a few examples that were some of the most helpful and inspirational “brief briefs” and directives I’ve ever received over the years.
“Inform and inspire runners.” → Nike+
One of the first projects I worked on for Nike was Nike Running in the early 2000s. An opportunity we saw was that the running world was still very analog at that time.
Even though there were plenty of digital watches on the market already, marathon runners, for instance, were keeping track of time manually. It was still years before the first iPhone and the masses hadn’t adopted smart digital devices.
During training, they would simulate a full marathon to know how fast they should be running each mile. For specific races, they would also have to take into account the elevation changes of each mile of the course and pace themselves so that they wouldn’t be too exhausted to finish the race in good time. They would then use an online tool that would calculate the pace of each mile, print out a thin strip with times for each mile, and then wrap it around their wrists that they could use while they ran.
For Nike Running, I designed its first online pace calculator tool. I hate how old I sound but I digress.
Around 2005, the technology started to become small and cheap enough, it was an obvious move for Nike to see if we could digitize all of this manual labor runners had to do before and during a marathon.
That would have fulfilled the “inform” part of the brief and would have been fine for most companies.
What set Nike as a marketer/brand/innovator, however, is the “inspire” part.
While athletes—both amateur and professional—use music as a way to improve their mood, motivation, and performance, not many sports allow us to use music during the act of sport itself. Running is one of those sports you can do while listening to music.
The idea of Nike+ was to create a kind of experience that not only would inform and improve the runner’s performance but also inspire by incorporating music into the product idea.
Until Nike+, the “inform” part of running, i.e. calculating the pace, and the “inspire” part were two distinct aspects of the sport.
Nike+ changed all that. And that started with this simple brief, “Inform and inspire runners.”
“R8 of car websites” → AudiUSA.com
I always did and still do love working on car brands. I’ve worked on various aspects of Cadillac, Nissan, VW, Toyota, Hyundai, etc., over the years. When it comes to designing a website for a car brand, it’s often about studying the competitors, knowing the best practices, and designing what we think is the optimal experience for browsing models.
In other words, all car websites end up looking and feeling the same.
I’m sure the original brief for the redesign of AudiUSA.com contained a lot of necessary and valuable information to help inspire designers to make the best possible car website. However, I don’t remember any of it.
The one thing I do remember and that became the most pivotal moment came when Scott Keogh, then the CEO of Audi of America, said “I want this website to be the R8 of car websites.”
Audi R8 was a thoroughbred of Audi’s model lineup, the pinnacle of its engineering prowess and design sensibilities. The metaphor Mr. Keogh used was elegant and perfect: it encapsulated what this new website should perform and feel like.
It distilled the challenge and visualized the goal.
Numerous requirements almost didn’t matter from that point. “The R8 of car websites” became the clear brief for the team—design, engineering, project management, etc.—and gave a visceral and intuitive reference for everyone on the team to aspire to.
“Loud but tasteful.” → Uniqlo StyleHint Harajuku
Uniqlo was our founding client for my company seven years ago. We continue to work directly with Mr. Tadashi Yanai, the global CEO and the founder of Uniqlo and its parent group company Fast Retailing.
At the age of 35 years old, Mr. Yanai started Uniqlo by opening its first store in the countryside city of Hiroshima in 1984. Since that humble beginning, he’s made Uniqlo one of the biggest apparel brands in the world in just a few decades.
Working with Mr. Yanai is always full of surprises—good and sometimes not so—and it keeps us on our toes. One of those surprises came when he was giving feedback on a retail concept that we were working on. The initial brief was to build a new, experimental retail concept integrating physical and digital. There were many functional specs as well as business requirements we were trying to address.
After several rounds of creative concepts with Uniqlo executives, we sought Mr. Yanai’s counsel on the direction.
“Loud but tasteful,” said Mr. Yanai, referencing a famous J-pop song from the 80s.
If you have been to a Uniqlo flagship store, you will understand this sentiment. Uniqlo flagship stores are the most meticulous, colorful, and well-curated warehouse of clothing. They are filled with a spectrum of colors from floor to ceiling, each item perfectly folded and stacked.
This directive reframed what we were trying to create. It not only gave myself and the rest of the team a better sense of what to do, but helped me understand his retail philosophy better.
Brief ≠ Prompt
While prompting AI requires us to be descriptive of what we want it to do, giving a good brief to humans is more art than science.
We aren’t trying to control the outcome. Rather, we need to inspire humans to imagine. We want the outcome to be beyond what we can produce on our own.
In a nutshell, a good brief does:
Distill
Reframe
Visualize
Elevate
Hope this can help with your work.
Thanks for reading. Hit reply with any feedback, thoughts, or questions. I’d love to hear from you.