A good, clean Creative Brief is a rare and essential piece of generating great work. If you’ve been around creative services agencies as long as I have, I’m sure you’ve seen a few wonderfully elegant examples, and many, many more lousy ones. The bad ones usually aren’t all that brief (more like a boxer brief?), and most meander without saying much of value.
To succeed, the brief itself has to be a good piece of design. It has to reconcile a set of basic contradictions: be short enough to save time, yet thorough enough to inform sufficiently. It will set specific requirements and boundaries on the outcome, without being prescriptive about how that outcome is to be accomplished. It will also strike a tone that is neutral enough to be credible and authoritative, yet provocative enough to inspire original ideas.
For many years, I’ve used this clip from the 1995 movie Apollo 13, about the perilously aborted moon mission of 1970, to demonstrate to both strategy and creative teams what a strong brief is all about. At the 0:47 mark of the clip, there's an 18-word, 10-second creative brief that wound up saving the lives of the three astronauts.
In the terse yet very human language of engineers, a problem is diagnosed, its urgency evaluated, and its parameters and likely consequences are communicated to a senior authority. That authority is able to process that information quickly, and succinctly play it back to them in the form of a clear directive to solve the problem, and grants the authority to the team leaders to handle it as they see fit with their people.
Those team leaders then clearly communicate to their staff (who have not been present for the previous discussions on the issue) exactly what they need to make and what they can use to accomplish it. And of course, the urgency of succeeding within a very short timeframe. And that's it.
Thankfully for the crew of Apollo 13, they succeeded. The “deliverable” may not have been aesthetically pleasing, but it was a beautifully creative and effective piece of work. That’s what matters in design and advertising too.
Apart from the drama of the situation, what always strikes me about this story (not just the movie depiction, but the first-person accounts of the actual events too) is how there are virtually no wasted words, yet no important information is omitted. Emotion certainly comes into play, but any frustration is aimed at the situation, not at the people relaying the truth behind the problem, nor the people tasked with solving it.
The key theme here is brevity, and useful brevity comes only from knowing your shit. That’s why those engineers at Houston Control were so effective.
Fortunately for us in the far more humble creative services environment, a good creative brief is not a matter of life and death. Here’s a quote often attributed to Albert Einstein: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” That’s why most Creative Briefs suck. The person writing it hasn’t done enough homework, or wasn’t given enough time to make it short. Einstein did indeed say something even more applicable: “Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.” That one belongs on every creative agency wall.