Creative Brief

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is a creative brief?

A creative brief is a document that’s produced by a campaign planner or channel manager for a design team, to help them produce the creative assets for an advertising campaign. A well-written creative brief inspires the creative team to present your core campaign message in a way that resonates with your target audience using images, videos, ad copy, ad formats, and other creative media. It helps ensure that all deliverables are appropriate to the campaign’s target audience, and align with the campaign’s budget, resources, and objective.

Content of a creative brief

A solid creative brief contains the following elements:

• Campaign details and objectives: Provide the context to the campaign, clarify any necessary constraints, and state the goals and objectives you’re trying to achieve.
• Ad placement overview: Provide an overview of where the ad will be served. Don’t go into granular detail. You can include the media plan as a separate document for reference purposes.
• Audience and research: To create the best deliverables, the team needs to know who’s going to seeing, watching, or reading their creations.
• Messaging: State the key message or ’big idea’ behind your campaign.
• Copy: Include the ad copy if it has already been written.
• Video script overview and theme for video: Provide details that help the team meet your video expectations, including duration, location requirements, and so on.
• Assets required: State required formats, pixel dimensions, whether images should be static or animated, number of versions, and other design elements.
• Brand guidelines: Include your logo, disclaimers, terms and conditions, offer end dates, and so on.

Benefits of a creative brief

A well-written creative brief is a crucial document, and it offers these benefits:

• Efficiently communicates requirements to the design team and reduces the amount of time and money spent making changes or reworking designs later in the project.
• Encourages campaign managers to think deeply about the campaign in terms of the final outputs that audiences will see on different websites. This provides them with a holistic view of the entire campaign and helps them evaluate media choices and the best way to communicate the campaign message using the available ad formats.
• Allows the campaign and creative teams to check and verify that the agreed messaging effectively delivers on campaign objectives and resonates with the audience.

Pro tip

When you’re working on a creative brief, be sure to fill out all the sections in your creative brief template. Think about the creative person who will be reading the finished document. Will they understand what you’re trying to tell them? Write clearly and succinctly but avoid taking shortcuts. It’s better to be specific and thorough at the outset, as valuable time may be lost because of changes going back and forth between team members. This can cause costs to escalate and negatively impact your budget.