I'm often conscious that my musings on brands and stuff can easily get a bit abstract and un-useful. All this talk of polyphonic brands and the tyranny of the big idea is fine if you're coffeeing with a bunch of smarty-pants planners but not much use if you're trying to get a campaign for a hard-nosed tyre retailer out the door and still get home in time for your child's birthday. Or something.
Anyway.
One of the regular emails I get is - what creative brief template do you use? And of course being a smarty-pants planner I tend to say that I don't believe in a standard template and it just leads to form-filing and while that's sort of true, if asked to write a brief I probably know what boxes I'd have, and how to fill them in. And anyway, there are other people out there, probably in a planning department of one who'd just like some help in what should go on a good creative brief. So I thought maybe we should try a wisdom of the crowds thing and try to
build the ultimate, all-purpose, ready for anything, use-it-until-you've-learned-to-do-without-it creative brief template.
I realise that this could be a rather protracted business, because your feelings on what should go into a creative brief are intimately tied to your beliefs about how you think communication works. And that's a whole, well, thing. But it'll be interesting to try.
I suspect at some point we'll resort to wikis and voting and probably a flickr group and geotagging but I think the first move in OpenCreativeBrief2.0 should be for people to post stuff in this comments field here. The stuff I'm thinking of would include:
Sections that you think should go on a creative brief (I'm assuming we'll have sections, you know, boxes to be filled in). It doesn't have to be all of them, just your favourites.
Links to, or copies of, fine examples of the creative brief art. So this can become a bit of a Creative Brief resource.
Criteria for our ultimate brief template other than the ones I'm going to write now:
1. Let's stipulate that this is the document that accompanies a briefing. It won't simply be emailed to someone or slipped under a door. It will be accompanied by your exciting self, emoting and inspiring like crazy.
2. But it has to be complete. We can't design something that's brilliantly brief - four catchy sentences say, but is then accompanied by a forty-page document that explains everything else. This thing we're building has to contain everything the recipient needs to know to do the job we're asking of them.
3. This is a document addressed to a team of doers (let's call them creative people). We're asking them to come up with an idea or ideas that involve changing the relationship between a brand, product, service or company and some people. (I'm trying to write that has un-adcentrically as possible, does it make sense?)
How does that sound? I'm rather looking forward to this. Let's go to work.
