Don't worry about your briefing template

In my experience, and I expect this is true for the majority of organisations, most people aren’t good at writing creative briefs and can’t afford to spend time getting better at writing them. They might have templates they should follow, but the templates never really fit what they want to say.

If this sounds like you, that’s ok. Instead, get really good at having conversations about the work with your creative team.

A good briefing is a conversation where both sides get to ask questions, clarify things and even start to bounce ideas around. Agencies often write a thing called a “reverse brief” off the back of conversations like this. This process is a simplified version of that. The specifics about exact deliverables should still be written down, but these days, it’s really easy to get AI to record your meeting and send you the summary later.

You really want to avoid the email brief, which is written conversationally, and looks brief-ish, but doesn’t have the clarity of a proper written brief, nor the back and forth, human-touch and depth of a good conversation.

Takeaway
– If you can’t write briefs, get good at conversations. They might save you time anyway.

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