Providing a project brief is a core skill of great marketers.
Too often I see so called marketers sounding off about service providers of all stripes for failing to deliver, when the brief against which they are being judged is a load of ambiguous, fluffy clichés.
It takes courage for a service provider to tell a principal their brief sucks, but if they are to deliver, the brief has to be good. It is usually best where there is genuine collaboration on the brief development, engaging all the available expertise in defining the problems to be addressed, and sorting the best way to go about it.
This requires not just the courage to speak up, but the intellectual freedom to do so, and follow differing lines of thought
Often time is a hard barrier, but in most cases that is because the marketer has failed in their duty to deeply consider the particular project in the context of the strategic framework, which is also often missing.
As a young marketer, we were always seeking the ‘big idea,’ the one thing that would make a difference, the Meadow Lea line ‘you ought to be congratulated’ for instance. This appears to have been replaced by the need to create an never ending flow of ideas for execution on all the new media platforms. However, a gaggle of mediocre creative does nothing except consume resources.
The day of the big idea is not gone, but we seem to grossly underestimate the time and intellectual energy necessary to come up with them.
