Show us yer briefs

Alarmingly few on the client side of the "information economy" know how to give a creative brief.

I know: yet another unfashionable opinion. There are, of course, some glowing exceptions within my own personal client list. However, I have found that few of my contemporaries in marketing roles within organisations know how to give a creative brief.

That's one end of the spectrum; the other is people who aren't my clients but run online businesses and approach me for work. Broadly speaking, they have less idea of giving a brief than they do about creating rocket-propelled grenades in a domestic kitchen.

I studied marketing, but I didn't learn to give a brief until I got a job and saw how others did it. I can't believe that in the last, oh, 15 years or so, no one has thought to teach undergraduates how to give—let alone take or interpret—a creative brief.

What's more concerning is that these greenhorns won't have anyone to learn from, since there are, apparently, few marketing departments where anyone more senior still knows how to give a brief.

The creative needs to know how to take a brief—sure. But it can be difficult (sometimes impossible) to communicate to a client who's never given one, and has grown up in the churn-and-burn, high-conversion, fuck-usability-fuck-users world of much online marketing, that a brief is even a thing, let alone a necessary thing.

I now find it easiest to just say no to such clients, and to revel—to crack champagne, make toasts, don gladrags—in the delights of those who do.

Because a brief helps the creative do a better job for the client. A brief makes it easier for us to make the client look good, which makes us look good, which means more work, and so the glorious cycle begins again...