What is a Creative Brief? Definition, Examples & Templates

“A creative brief is the most sacred of all sacred ad documents."

A detailed creative brief may not always be required, but most of the time, starting a project without one is like flying blind. The process must be as effective as feasible because many marketing departments produce large amounts of collateral and must be as nimble as possible in their distribution. And a solid creative brief is the first step in that process.

The first stage in any endeavor that is successful is creating a game plan with a specific goal. One of the reasons why marketers adore creative briefs is this. A creative brief serves as a road plan for a project, guiding it from conception to completion. It guarantees clear communication of the project’s objectives, timing, key stakeholders, and scope. Everyone working on a project must rely only on the creative brief as the source of truth. The creative brief will correctly point out things if problems arise or tasks need clarification.

What is a Creative Brief?

A creative project’s strategy is outlined in a document called a creative brief. A creative brief includes the following project information:

• Goals for the project
• Requirements
• Messaging
• Demographics
• Deadlines

To advertise your goods, the marketing team is working on a new, imaginative campaign. You can’t wait to get started, but where do you begin? There is copy to write, landing pages to make, and movies to make. Everyone must agree on the objectives, target audience, spending limit, and timeframe. A creative brief is necessary.

A creative brief is a concise document summarising the mission, goals, difficulties, demographics, messaging, and other important information for a marketing, advertising, or design project. A consultant or a creative project manager is frequently the one who creates it. Before the start of a project, stakeholder alignment is the aim of a brief.

To advertise your goods, the marketing team is working on a new, imaginative campaign. You can’t wait to get started, but where do you begin? There is copy to write, landing pages to make, and movies to make. Everyone must agree on the objectives, target audience, spending limit, and timeframe. A creative brief is necessary.

A creative brief is a concise document that summarizes the mission, goals, difficulties, demographics, messaging, and other important information for a marketing, advertising, or design project. A consultant or a creative project manager is frequently the one who creates it. Before the start of a project, stakeholder alignment is the aim of a brief.

A creative brief, typically created during the project initiation phase, will aid an innovative team in better understanding a project from the outset and may be provided to essential stakeholders and clients.

Even though not every creative brief is the same, they all have the same basic structure. Also, trying to use one detailed creative brief form for all of your work would be a massive waste of time and effort because specific projects need more thorough planning than others.

Start by speaking with the project stakeholders, whether you’re a consultant delivering a creative brief to a client or a project manager providing a brief to your team. Thanks to these interactions, you will better understand the company’s mission, the project goals, and the difficulties your team faces.

This is where marketing work management technologies with electronic creative briefs are helpful. If it’s a good tool, you may customize the briefs to include the details required for that particular project type.

While the concept of a creative brief seems straightforward, it can be challenging to condense many crucial facts into a limited number of pages. To fit on one to two pages, a creative brief is often composed of eight pieces. Typically for a marketing or advertising campaign, a creative brief is a document that specifies the creative strategy and deliverables for a new body of work.

Why is Creative Brief Needed?

A creative brief is a document that helps bring your creative team’s members together. This brief explains the nature of your project, its objectives, and its general look and feels to the artists, photographers, layout, and graphic designers. Also, writers use it, and executives most likely see it or approve it. It crowds all the creative cats to use a proverb.

Although crucial, a creative brief can serve as something other than a general reference guide. For the most part, it is a checklist to ensure the creative team isn’t overlooking anything while conceptualizing and working through the creative process. For everyone working on a project, the creative brief is the only reliable source of information.

It makes meetings flow more smoothly and cuts down on back-and-forth talking about perspectives and examples. It offers you special rates and aids in helping independent designers scope jobs. Without a brief, you might have to make several adjustments, deal with annoying phone calls, and spend excessive time and money to get things right. An absence of briefs, according to marketer Mark Hadley, “may leave both sides disappointed: clients may be angry that they do not get what they want, and the designer or writer may feel their customer is being tough or indecisive.”

The following is the outline:

• Project Name
• Company Background
• Project Objective
• Target Audience
• Competitors
• Key Message
• Key Consumer Benefit
• Attitude
• Call to Action
• Distribution

How to Write a Creative Brief?

Choose a name for the project.

Choosing a project name is the first step in creating a creative brief. Although it may seem straightforward, this is one of the most important aspects of a creative brief. The campaign name will be the first time many team members have heard of the product or service if you’re creating a campaign around it.

Write about the company and briefly describe the project’s history.

The firm history is another straightforward yet crucial component. This is non-negotiable if you operate in an agency setup because your team manages multiple client campaigns simultaneously. Nonetheless, you should still include this section if creating a creative brief for an internal project.

Emphasize the project’s goal.

The creative brief becomes more detailed at this point. The project’s goal, schedule, and intended audience should all be briefly explained in the project objective. This can be said in one or two sentences, but you can be creative and style it in different parts.

Identify the target market.

The project’s target audience needs to be identified next. This is the section of your market from the newly launched good or service that would most immediately benefit. By establishing a primary and secondary audience, you can go beyond audience segmentation. If you do this, your team will have more freedom to investigate original concepts that appeal to one group over the other.

Understand the market environment.

The entire team benefits from knowing what your rivals are doing. You can use competition data to develop previously untested concepts, learn from their unsuccessful endeavors, or create a project that enhances a past tactic they have employed.

Prepare the main point.

As almost every stakeholder will have a different idea of what it should be, developing the core message might be the most challenging part of the creative brief.

Choose the critical consumer benefit.

If you’re launching a new product, the target market will probably have access to several features and advantages when they choose to buy it. Yet, organizing a campaign around a variety of attributes is exceedingly challenging. Marketers and creatives employ a key consumer benefit (KCB) in the creative brief to ensure everyone is on the same page regarding the main advantage being communicated.

Choose a mindset.

Every creative piece generated should maintain the tone and voice that define your campaign’s overall attitude.

Choose the most effective call to action.

Finally, once they have seen your campaign, your audience wants something to do. CTAs have the advantage of not having to be physical activities. A CTA may aim to alter audience opinions and perceptions of your brand without asking them to take action.

Create the distribution schedule.

Make sure your audience sees the project after it is finished. In addition to any promotional content you intend to produce, list a few channels or platforms where you plan to promote the launch.

Stakeholders should be given the creative brief.

Share your creative brief with the team you’ll be working with after you’ve completed it. Also, it would help if you shared it with the rest of the organization via Slack, emails, or presentations. Encourage your clients to distribute the brief internally if you are a consultant outside the client’s organization.

Some Good Creative Brief Examples to Get Inspired:

Skype

Most likely, you’ve heard of Skype. But can you put it to use?

The World, according to Skype, is the title of their brand book. And right immediately, the header gives the impression that it will be approachable for all demographics.

The short is filled with humorous drawings and dialogue; even the font is kid-friendly. Also, their initial purpose statement serves as the ideal gateway into their approachable tone of voice.

People are the center of Skype. They are very clear about this. Thus, using actual user tales and recreating them in their distinctive speech bubbles is one of their primary marketing techniques.

Visit Skype to know more about it.

Hulu

Hulu employs four different sorts of brand voice:

Always a tale: talkative, sentimental, and unexpected

Wonderfully human: intelligent, sympathetic, and open to all

Act differently: confident, upbeat, and witty

Simply necessary: clear, energized, and bold

Visit Hulu, to see if for you.

Who Creates the Creative Brief?

Traditionally, the person in charge of managing the client connection for the creative firm filled up templates for creative briefs. Of course, that applies to you if you work freelance. But, in a more prominent company, that person can be one of several. 

The creative director, designer, project manager, strategist, planner, producer, or account executive could all write a creative brief. Who has the most experience with clients and projects is the best individual to draught the Brief. 

The writer must clearly define the direction for the creative’s concept and implementation. That’s the creative director a lot of the time. It takes considerable effort and skill to write a solid creative brief.

Creative Brief template:

GatherContent

Do you have any ambitious content projects planned? If so, your content marketing team will find this form for a content project a priceless tool. The template covers the project summary, key performance indicators (KPIs), and budget. Fill it out with the information about your project and distribute it to your team.

This template belongs to the more significant genre of creative briefs, even if it is content-specific. This is because it is for a bigger project, not just one component or a small portion of a marketing plan. There are several popular GatherContent alternatives that also have creative briefs, which may be more specific in nature

Omniscient Digital

A thorough content brief is used by the content agency Omniscient Digital. It contains keywords, SEO metadata, a description of the target demographic, search intent, rival content, and more.

Reebok

This Reebok creative brief is a wonderful illustration of customer focus. Despite being shorter than many briefs, it does include extensive information on the target market. It talks about their identities and personal situations. They should mention the biggest problem they have and how the brand solves it. Copywriters, designers, and others who create print advertisements find these facts helpful.

Putting it All Together:

The creative brief is a map highlighting the prominent landmarks but may include only some attractions. It’s essential for maintaining alignment among all team members and stakeholders. 

Yet, it is not the end-all-be-all.

Even when you incorporate the key components, remember to leave room for innovation (e.g., target audience, messaging, tone guidelines, etc.).

Want to improve the way you manage your products and create content? It’s time to give Chisel Labs a try if you’re sick of managing various platforms for short development, content writing, and content reviews.