Strategy
ABOUT STRATEGY
The Most Expensive Document Nobody Writes
On the brief. Why it fails. And why getting it right is the whole job.
Most marketing money isn't wasted on bad creative. It's wasted before the creative starts.
It gets wasted at the brief. Or, more precisely, at the absence of one.
I've worked across the Gulf, EMEA, and beyond, and the brief problem is everywhere. But it wears different costumes depending on where you are.
In the Middle East, it arrives as a 40-page RFP. Company history, procurement procedures, a media plan written before the strategy, and somewhere on page 31, the closest thing to a problem statement: "increase brand awareness."
That's not a problem. That's a wish.
In other markets, the brief skips the ceremony but manages to skip the clarity too. What you get is a chat, a deck, or an email that ends with "let me know your thoughts." No target. No tension. No direction. Just a general sense that something should happen.
The One-Liner Test
At Havas, we used to run a session we called the One-liner Brief Breakfast. The challenge: reduce your brief to a single sentence. One sentence. The logic behind it: if you can't articulate what you need in one sentence, you don't know what you need.
We'd sit across the table and watch very smart, very senior people struggle to finish the sentence. Not because they lacked intelligence. Because they'd never been asked to be that precise.
Most clients arrived with their thinking half-baked and expected the agency to finish cooking it.
Very few clients got to that single sentence on the fifth try.
The Numbers Are Brutal
The BetterBriefs report, co-authored with Mark Ritson and the IPA, confirmed what every agency person already knew.
80% of marketers believe they're good at writing briefs. Only 10% of agencies agree.
One third of all marketing budgets are estimated to be wasted due to poor briefs and misdirected work. And 60% of marketers use the creative process to clarify their strategy, rather than arriving with it already formed.
Read that last one again. Sixty percent of marketers are paying agencies to work out what they themselves should have resolved before the first meeting.
"Writing bad briefs is the most expensive way to write advertising." — Sir John Hegarty
Two Briefs. One Album. Worlds Apart.
In 2023, Charli XCX briefed the visual identity for Brat. The brief, written in full capitals, set out a world: the artwork would be obnoxious, arrogant, and bold. Some people would hate it. There would be no explanation because the answer is always "no comment." The campaign was described as high art, but also as low art and celebrity, and the coupling of the two was declared vital.
Three paragraphs. No objectives slide. No target audience demographic. No KPI. Just a world, a posture, and an unambiguous creative direction. She briefed on a conviction.
Now imagine the same campaign briefed by a conventional marketing team. The result looks something like the parody that circulated alongside the original brief: Objective: Increase sales. Single-Minded Proposition: Cool. Media Strategy: Currently pretending it isn't just paid Meta ads. KPIs: Buzz. Fans should feel the vibe.
Funny. Until you realize that the second version is what most briefs actually look like. Dressed in professional language. Stripped of conviction. A document that protects the writer from accountability rather than giving the creative team something real to work with.
A brief is not a cover-your-back exercise. It's a transfer of vision.
The Problem Nobody Defines
Most briefs fail at exactly the same point: problem definition. They describe a situation but never name the problem. They list what the brand does but never articulate what's blocking growth.
Einstein, had a line about this: if he had an hour to solve a problem, he'd spend fifty-five minutes defining it and five minutes solving it.
The brief is the fifty-five minutes.
We've inverted the ratio. Marketers spend five minutes on the brief and expect the agency to spend the rest of the engagement figuring out what was actually being asked. “Without strategic clarity, there can be no brief. Targeting, positioning, objectives. These are the precondition, not the output, of a briefing process.” – Mark Ritson
The Internal Brief Nobody Talks About
Here's what consistently gets overlooked: the brief is not just an external document. It is internal alignment made visible.
I've sat in briefing rooms where two senior clients disagreed about the target audience halfway through the session. Not nuance. Fundamental disagreement about who the brand was for. The agency sat there, taking notes on a conversation that should have happened months earlier.
A clear brief is evidence of strategic consensus. A vague brief is evidence of strategic avoidance. Decisions deferred until the agency could absorb the ambiguity.
A brief that tries to do everything has decided nothing.
Before briefing anyone, ask yourself one question: can you reduce this to a single sentence?
Not a tagline. Not a KPI. A problem statement: we need this audience to change this behaviour because this is what's currently standing in the way.
If you can't finish that sentence, you're still in strategy. Do the strategy first.
Ask what problem specifically needs solving by the end of this campaign. Not what to produce. Not what the budget is. What problem. If the client can't answer, help them find it before you accept anything.
The brief is the most important strategic document in the entire marketing process. Getting it right is not overhead.
Everything else is execution.
Stay strategic, my friends.
João Ruas
Senior Marketing Strategist and Founder of About Strategy
Hi, I'm Joao Ruas, senior marketing strategist and author of ABOUT STRATEGY. I write short, actionable pieces on market and brand strategy. Follow and subscribe. Would love to connect.
Reference: BetterBriefs Project Global Report, 2021. Published in partnership with the IPA (Incorporated by Royal Charter).
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