Why Every Creative Brief Should Come with a Travel Adapter
We need to talk about creative briefs. Not the documentary kind or those quite-good ones from Cannes that someone presented at an offsite once. I mean the brief you opened this morning, skimmed, then quietly whispered something dark under your breath.
Here’s the thing: New Zealand is brilliant at marketing homegrown stories, ideas with sand between their toes. But why do so many briefs feel like they were written in a terminal departure lounge at 3am by three marketers agreeing to disagree? Vague KPIs, an audience described as 'everyone,' cultural insights that feel lifted from a 2008 Nielsen deck. All wrapped in optimistic PowerPoint salmon.
A good brief should be like a universal travel adapter. Plug us into context. Tell us what the product smells like, how it behaves in the wild, where its insecurities are buried. Instead, most feel like the creative equivalent of 'we need to go viral.' My favourite briefs are the weirdly specific ones. I once got a brief that linked me to a Reddit thread about 1970s fridge magnets. It won an award. Not because of nostalgia, but because we had something to grip. Something sticky, again, like those fridge magnets.
If we want to make work that travels, it has to start grounded. Not in cliched brand onions or strategy pyramids, but in real, generous articulation. So here’s a proposal: next time you write a brief, imagine you’re explaining the product to someone over fish and chips on a chilly Wellington esplanade. If they ask, ‘So what’s the actual story?’, and you can’t answer in under twenty seconds, it’s back to the start. Put the onion away. Grab a map. Ask your audience what they actually care about. And for the love of clarity, give us something we can plug into.
Here’s the thing: New Zealand is brilliant at marketing homegrown stories, ideas with sand between their toes. But why do so many briefs feel like they were written in a terminal departure lounge at 3am by three marketers agreeing to disagree? Vague KPIs, an audience described as 'everyone,' cultural insights that feel lifted from a 2008 Nielsen deck. All wrapped in optimistic PowerPoint salmon.
A good brief should be like a universal travel adapter. Plug us into context. Tell us what the product smells like, how it behaves in the wild, where its insecurities are buried. Instead, most feel like the creative equivalent of 'we need to go viral.' My favourite briefs are the weirdly specific ones. I once got a brief that linked me to a Reddit thread about 1970s fridge magnets. It won an award. Not because of nostalgia, but because we had something to grip. Something sticky, again, like those fridge magnets.
If we want to make work that travels, it has to start grounded. Not in cliched brand onions or strategy pyramids, but in real, generous articulation. So here’s a proposal: next time you write a brief, imagine you’re explaining the product to someone over fish and chips on a chilly Wellington esplanade. If they ask, ‘So what’s the actual story?’, and you can’t answer in under twenty seconds, it’s back to the start. Put the onion away. Grab a map. Ask your audience what they actually care about. And for the love of clarity, give us something we can plug into.