I’ve been delivering creative brief writing training to agency strategists and client service teams for most of my career. And, by far, the two most common problems I see with people’s creative briefs are sub-standard propositions (which is a whole other post) and excessive length.
It’s called a creative brief, not a creative long. 2-3 pages should be sufficient for most day-to-day briefs and most brief templates, perhaps pushing onto a fourth page if you’ve got multiple target audiences to cover off or have really complex info about deliverables to share with the creatives working on it.
Anything else should be shared in the briefing itself (because emailing briefs to creatives without a proper handover is, emergencies aside, unprofessional and rude). Got really complicated tech to explain? Take the creatives through it in the briefing and be ready to answer questions. Need to show what the previous campaign looked like? Stick the images in a powerpoint and go through them in the briefing. And then, obviously, share links to this background info in the brief or after the briefing so that the creatives can go back and revisit them if needed.
Expecting creatives to wade through a ten or even fourteen page brief is insane. The brief writer hasn’t done their job of pulling out the relevant information to share and the proposition, however good or bad it may be, will inevitably get lost among the information overload. I’ve heard agency horror stories of war-and-peace length briefs resulting in vital reasons to believe or deliverables getting overlooked and of the resulting client fallout.
Don’t be that person, keep it brief. And if you or your team need some support with getting your briefs shorter and sharper, get in touch.