I have a low boredom threshold and go crazy with long meetings and even more crazy with long documents and presentations. It will, therefore, not be much of a surprise to hear that I think most copy strategies are just plain stupid and unhelpful as they are too long.When writing a brief it is best to be like briefs themselves - covering the bare essentials unlike boxers covering much more
A long copy strategy brief is dangerous as it allows the creatives the opportunity to make strategic choices instead of marketers. Marketers should be closest to the consumer, brand and market and making the choices. The best thing to give a creative person is a highly constraining brief so the only escape is for them to engage their creativity to escape. Put them in a tiny box and let them create a way out.
I insist on the teams I work with to write their creative brief/ copy strategy on a post-it note. I am trying to make that the small post-it note instead of the 2 or 3 pages usually written. (Admittedly they like to attach a 2 or 3 page document to the post-it note so I humour them for now).
Recently when out with the Creative Director of DDB Paris, he really made me think even more about this as he said all he and his teams need is 2 things:
(1) What do you want to say?
(2) How do you want to say it?
I argued you needed to add a 3rd: WHO do you want to say it to?
He felt that was part of (1).
Every time I look at ad test results or brand health monitors/ tracking it always reminds me that consumers take out one clear thing really about the brand and so make sure you do that and be it the post-it note or the 2 or 3 approach make sure it is just one.
A team wanted to say, for example, something like: fresh, shine free skin all day. I wouldn't sign it off until they chose one thing (shine free all day) as if they had Fresh and Shine Free the creatives could have chosen which to play up.
Another team got in a rant as the agency internal creative brief they got back was not "on brief". But looking at the original brief and the creative brief all the agency had done was pick one of the three reasons to believe and focus on that one. It happened to be the one the brand team liked the least - but they were the ones that were at fault by not being more focused.
The post-it note approach works as it forces choices. It also checks if the story all links and flows...that is why when thinking of writing a creative brief we should be thinking small just covering the bare essentials rather than thinking of covering a lot of ground (like boxer shorts do!)
2 comments:
Gary, in my experience the size of a brief is directly linked to the politics within the organisation. I believe that marketeers are generally quite clear on what they want. It's when they try to incorporate or even worse anticipate their senior management that it all goes wrong.
Sounds like your guys will make an attitude shift very quickly!
I agree that 3. is an important part of marketing -surely the traditional sense of 'marketing' is presenting products/services in a way that makes them desirable. To an extent, some products can at first seem self-limiting, for example, you may think that a product is only sellable to a certain section of society, yet the job of a marketer is to promote that product to different people so, obviously, you need to adjust your presentation to the people you are trying to meet. As BA showed with their 'ethnic tail' livery, you cannot use one marketing strategy for all customers!
I formerly worked in marketing and business development, now I am in more of a supervisory role as CEO for a large group, and the one thing that I really don't need are overly technical, over-intellectual presentations/ideas. You are obviously of the same ilk as me -there's no point shouting about a phd thesis in marketing if you don't get the basics right!!
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