The Secret to Improved Marketing Alignment: Moving from Creative Briefs to Discussions

It is said that David Ogilvy once said, “Give me the freedom of a tight brief.” It is thought that briefs that are focused and detailed, leaving little room for interpretation, lead to the best creative results. The idea for creative briefs came from advertising companies in the 1960s. They were a way for the account planner, who was closest to the client, to start the creative process.

Well-done creative briefs are still an important basic tool for marketers today, but they take time, which is something marketers don’t have much of. More and more, this method needs to be paired with ones that are more interactive and conversational. Organizations move quickly, and new ways of working mean that we need to take a more flexible approach.

Using creative guidelines too much.

The creative brief is usually written by the person who wants creative teams to work on something. It was used in content marketing to make sure that the goal, target audience, key messages, tone, and results were all well thought out before an ad campaign started.

But some content and creative marketers have gone too far with the idea of a creative plan. Marketers don’t give broad instructions for a campaign; instead, they use creative plans to start even small tasks.

If a marketer at these companies wants to promote a webinar, they might need to make different briefs for an email, a landing page, and social media posts. That wasn’t even close to “brief”! When creative ideas are used too much, they become administrative problems that make it hard for stakeholders to talk to each other and for teams to work together.

Creative tasks have their limits.

For another thing, artistic briefs leave room for error. As information moves from one person to another, it gets worse. The original goal of the work can get lost, which can lead to extra work and efforts that aren’t really needed. When two people read the same sentence, they can have very different ideas about what it means.

Tough rules about creative tasks can also stop people from being creative and coming up with new ideas. Imagine that you are in charge of advertising a new smartphone for a business that makes electronics for people. The creative brief gives specific words and numbers that must be used in the main message to highlight the phone’s long battery life. The creative team wants to show how long the battery lasts by using real-life examples, such as how long the battery lasts when shooting video. However, their idea doesn’t use exact words or numbers. The creative head turns it down.

Not long after the ad starts, the competition comes out with a smartphone that has a slightly longer battery life. It draws attention to the ability to record videos, which is more in line with what people want and makes the first ad pointless.

Giving people time and space to talk.

In the above case, a conversation could have helped figure out the subtlety that would have saved the effort. Instead of flatly denying the idea, the teams could talk about it to learn more about the problems, the points of view, and the chances. Did the person who wrote the brief think about how the battery life would be used in real life? Was there a strong reason to focus on the battery life that wasn’t in the brief? A few easy questions could help make things clearer.

Still, the question stands: how do marketers find time for these important talks when everyone is busy?

Making things predictable and aligned.

Marketers can get back some of their time by using tools like cadence and timing that aren’t used enough. When things happen regularly, this is called cadence. Requests could be looked at a few times a week, for instance, to keep work moving through the content teams. This makes things more predictable because both the teams that turn in work and the teams that do the work know when and where they can talk about requests.

Cadence goes against the idea that each piece of work needs its own meeting. Instead of setting up a meeting just to talk about one piece of work, bring it to meetings that have already been planned and let people know what will be talked about.

Being in sync means getting things in line. Some requests may only need a small amount of synchronization, while others may need a long talk. Mark the meeting invite with which is which. Timeboxing, brainstorming, and the parking lot are all methods that can be used to keep these discussions on track.

Are you worried that open conversation will take too much time? To cut through the fight of ideas, use the Agile value of trying new things. In the battery example from earlier, the person who sent the request could take into account what the creative team said and set up an A/B test to compare cell life to real-life use cases.

The end goal is shared alignment, which stops confusion and extra work while making things better.

Last thoughts

Content marketing teams may not be looking closely enough at creative tasks, which is an area that could use some work. Teams may use briefs too much, which can make them inconvenient to deal with, or they may use them instead of talking, which can cause mistakes and extra work.

Adding talks to the process, especially well-run meetings that happen on a regular basis, can help with flow, predictability, and alignment.