| 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
- Name the one objective. One. A brief with three objectives produces work
that serves none of them and cannot be judged afterwards.
- Fix the measure now — the number, and what counts as working. Written
after the results, a measure makes every campaign a success.
- Name the audience from the
audiences ledger, not from imagination. If
the right row does not exist, that is the first piece of work.
- State the single message. If it cannot be said in a sentence, the
campaign will not survive being compressed into an ad.
- 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.
- 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.
