What Your Agency is Probably Missing in its Creative Briefs

Let’s talk about creative briefs for a minute. Yes, those 1-2 pagers that explain to your client how your campaign will achieve all the goals they have in mind? When composing the creative brief, there’s one thing we should be aspiring to from the onset: we must seek to inspire, not just inform. 

Remember the creative team is your audience; therefore they will care about how you make them feel, how you touch their hearts, not just their heads.

Okay, now that’s out of the way. We won’t bore you with details of composing a well-written creative brief. We’ll assume you’re an expert, and if not, there’s plenty of online tutorials and great examples to help you write killer briefs. But how can you create a brief that goes beyond just words? To engage your team and win them over, and then win over more clients too.

What do your standout creative briefs look like today? Do they include audio/visual? Maybe a few links of inspiring examples? Or do you immerse your audience in the experience you hope to create? Yes, it takes preparation, and some creative ingenuity, but it’s not as hard as you think.

There are two parts to creating engaging creative briefs:

1. Include an engagement strategy in your creative briefs
2. Have access to the technology that supports your engagement strategy

Confused? Okay, let’s try to unpack this:

Including an engagement strategy in your creative briefs

Many creatives and marketers shy away from certain strategies because they are simply too hard to execute. In the past, an engagement campaign that relies on contesting and prizing may have required many vendors, and in turn, a massive budget and resources to roll-out. However, with the help of marketing platform’s like SPRY it’s possible to rollout an entire engagement campaign in under 10-days. The ability to easily customize a trivia game, or scratch and win game, with branded elements, can happen in a snap.

This also goes for your creative briefs. So, before we get into the technology component, let’s assume you understand that including an engagement strategy in your campaign is not only possible but much easier than ever before.

So, your first step is to include an engagement strategy in your brief. For some quick examples of engagement programs, head over to our client page and flip through the case studies they’ve executed. Additionally, here’s a sizzle reel that includes a number of these examples:

Having access to the technology that supports your engagement strategy

As mentioned earlier, innovative marketing platforms like SPRY enable creative teams to develop engagement programs quickly and effectively. They allow creative teams to see and experience the engagement in real-time, and visualize exactly how this will look and feel for a consumer. When we speak with clients, it’s easy to either quickly spin out an example for their brand, or send over a previously created example. We’re a bit more tight-lipped about handing over those to just anyone, but if you’re committed to learning more, you can check out those experiences in our walkthroughs here.

The ability to instantly spin out an example for your creative team to see, feel, and experience, is an indispensable component to your brief that is sure to impress and inspire. Plus, once you’re able to successfully impress your team with your engagement program, taking it to the pitch meeting is sure to wow clients and give you a competitive edge. We were recently pulled into a pitch meeting and had the entire panel play a real-time trivia game for a chance to win prizing. Needless to say it captivated and “woo’ed” even the biggest of sceptics.

Are you doing enough to inspire and engage your teams, and your clients, with your creative briefs and pitches? Learn more about how to create your own engagement program now by connecting with our team.

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