campaign-brief

name	Campaign Brief
description	Turn a request into a brief the whole agency can work from, with the measure fixed before anything is produced.
category	Strategy

Campaign Brief

The document that stops four specialists producing four coherent things that do not fit together. Write it before anyone opens a design tool or an ad account.

When to use

• Anything is about to be produced by more than one person.
• A client asks for "a campaign" without saying what for.

Steps

1. Name the one objective. One. A brief with three objectives produces work that serves none of them and cannot be judged afterwards.
2. Fix the measure now — the number, and what counts as working. Written after the results, a measure makes every campaign a success.
3. Name the audience from the audiences ledger, not from imagination. If the right row does not exist, that is the first piece of work.
4. State the single message. If it cannot be said in a sentence, the campaign will not survive being compressed into an ad.
5. Check campaigns for prior art. Most ideas here have been run; the closed rows say how they went, and reading them is the cheapest research available.
6. Set the budget and the channels, and open the campaigns row in proposed. Spending starts at approval, not here.

Output

A brief carrying objective, measure, audience, message, channels and budget, and a campaigns row in proposed. Approval is the operator's.