• Marketing Mag Website

  • Marketing Blogs

by Geoffrey McDonald Bowll

on Apr 9

Guerilla Guide: Briefing ad agencies

Advertise with us

The creative industry, theoretical brief

1. Project management
2. Where are we now?
3. Where do we want to be?
4. What are we doing to get there?
5. Who do we need to talk to?
6. How do we know we’ve arrived?
7. Practicalities
8. Approvals

Source: The Client Brief: A best practice guide to briefing communications agencies.

The inimitable Geoffrey Bowll delivers the inside line on briefing ad agencies.

I’m sitting in a city café and it ain’t as simple as ‘white with one’ anymore. Skinny cap, soy mocha, skinny soy latte in a mug with the handle facing south. So many variations. People have too much time, too little to do. Here I am ordering a boring old skinny latte, which means cow’s milk… what an environmental sin! Fancy buying the juice of a methane-producing polluter… Do I try to fit in and order a soy drink? Bugger it. I hear soy gives you cancer anyway. Plus I’m already the odd one out: I’m the only person I can see who’s not wearing a tie.

Opposite me is the client, a major player in the finance industry. She’s very bright, very professional, but struggling with her role today. She asks me if I take on briefs. I’m appalled at her forwardness… (Sorry, had to try the joke, but pathetic, I know.) She ignores me, like the entire world population who are under 30, and goes on to explain her dilemma. They are having trouble penetrating the teenage market. Seems teenagers think and respond completely differently to anyone else in their customer base. Amazing. (It is always quite a problem for those in mass marketing. How do you keep a level of brand consistency when the message has to be radically different? But I digress again…) I should mention this is a professional organisation we’re discussing here. While they represent older, conservative, mostly white men, their core target market (for members) is younger, hipper and, like every group today, they are trying to be non-gender specific, non-racially biased.

We go though her understanding of the mindset of the target teenagers. We discuss the findings from a few focus groups they’ve just run. Then she pulls out a folder – it’s neatly blocked together in colours per issue – under headings like ‘pricing’, ‘psychological impacts’, ‘media use’ etc. She squirms, from what I’m guessing is embarrassment. It’s so big I start to feel faint. (Like those folders you get handed on a two-week live-in course.) Maybe I need a glass of water. I catch the eye of a waiter…

I’m hoping, as you do, they don’t really want us to take this all in and come back with something sensible. But, yes, they do. Yes, she expects us to wade through hundreds of pages of tightly typed notes to understand her brief. I think, as I smile and go slowly pale, that it’s got to come from above. This isn’t her. This anal, control freak stuff must be from senior management. I tell her I’ll email back my understanding of her brief, before I send it on to the creatives. That will save her time/money and stop me losing a few from jumping out the window into oncoming traffic.

There’s a point in life where you want to be professional, and there’s a point in life where you have to say, “This is over the top”. Two hundred pages of detail for a job that’s only worth a few hundred grand is a waste of a couple weeks. All it says is one of two things. Either you need another job ‘cause you’re so bored you actually have got time to put together a folder like this, or you need another job because someone in your organisation thinks you need to put together folders like this to brief somebody.

  • Article links
  • Article links

Be the first to have your say...

To have your say, login at the top of the page or register free and start commenting.