How to Brief a Marketing Agency

A good brief is short, honest and surprisingly hard to write. The difficulty is not the writing; it is that a brief forces an organisation to say what it actually wants, in front of colleagues who may disagree. Most bad briefs are the residue of an unresolved internal argument.

Here is what belongs in one, what does not, and how to write something that gets you real thinking instead of a polite guess.

What a brief is actually for

A brief is not a specification for work you have already designed. It is a description of a problem, precise enough that a competent outsider can propose a solution you had not thought of.

That distinction changes everything. If you brief a deliverable — “we need a new website” — you will get a website, priced. If you brief a problem — “our sales team spends the first twenty minutes of every call explaining what we do” — you might get a website, or you might get something faster, cheaper and more effective. You are buying judgement. Give it something to work on.

The five things every brief needs

1. The commercial objective. What has to be true in twelve months that is not true today? Revenue, pipeline, entry to a market, defending a position, launching a product. Not “increase brand awareness” unless you can say why awareness is the constraint.
2. The audience. Who decides, who influences, who blocks. What they currently believe. What they would need to believe instead. Real behaviour, not a persona with a stock photo and a coffee preference.
3. What is true today. The honest current state: what is working, what is not, what you have already tried and what happened. This is the section people sanitise, and it is the most valuable one.
4. The constraints. Timing, budget, regulation, legacy systems, a stakeholder who will veto anything green, a launch date tied to an event. Constraints are not embarrassing. They are the shape of the problem.
5. How the decision gets made. Who signs off, on what criteria, and by when. An agency that knows this will bring you something you can actually approve.

Say something about budget

Withholding budget is understandable and usually counterproductive. The concern is that a number becomes a target rather than a ceiling. The cost of hiding it is that everyone proposes into a vacuum: you get three proposals at three unrelated scales and no way to compare them.

A range is enough. “Between X and Y, and we would go further if the case is convincing” tells an agency whether to propose a campaign or a component, and lets them tell you honestly if your ambition and your budget are not currently on speaking terms.

What to leave out

• The solution. If you have already decided the answer, you are placing an order. That is fine — but call it an order, not a brief, and do not expect strategic thinking you have pre-empted.
• A channel list posing as a strategy. “We need TikTok, a podcast and a rebrand” is a list of outputs. What is the problem those are meant to solve?
• Competitor envy. “Like theirs, but ours” imports their strategy, their audience and their constraints, none of which are yours.
• Everything. A brief that lists nine priorities has none. Rank them and put the ranking in writing.

Define what success looks like — honestly

Agree the measure before the work starts, including its limitations. If attribution in your category is genuinely difficult, say so now rather than discovering it in the first quarterly review. If the real measure is a twelve-month sales cycle, do not pretend a six-week campaign will show it; agree the leading indicators you will accept in the meantime.

The point is not to lower the bar. It is to make sure everyone is looking at the same bar. This is also the difference between a report and a performance conversation that leads somewhere.

Name the decision-maker

Work dies in ambiguity about who approves it. If four people can each say no and none can say yes, the output converges on whatever offends nobody, which is usually whatever achieves nothing.

Name the decision-maker in the brief. Get them in the first meeting, even briefly. An hour of their time at the start saves a month of interpretation at the end.

Common failure modes

• The brief written to be approved internally. It has been through so many hands that every specific claim has been removed. It reads well and says nothing.
• The brief as a wish list. Every stakeholder's request, appended. No priority, no trade-offs, no chance.
• The brief with a hidden agenda. The real reason for the project is political and unstated, so the work is judged against criteria nobody has shared.
• The 40-page brief. Length is not rigour. If the argument does not fit on two pages, the argument is not finished.

A one-page structure you can copy

1. Context — what the organisation does and what has changed.
2. Problem — what is not working, with evidence.
3. Objective — what must be true in twelve months.
4. Audience — who, what they believe, what they need to believe.
5. Proposition — what we can honestly claim, and the proof.
6. Constraints — timing, budget range, regulatory, technical, political.
7. Measures — how success is judged, and the known limitations.
8. Process — who decides, by when, on what criteria.
9. Non-negotiables — what must not change, and why.

Nine headings. One page. If you can fill that in honestly, you will get better proposals from everyone you send it to — including agencies you do not choose.

If you would like a second pair of eyes on a brief before it goes out, send it to whatsup@gridbros.co. We will give you a straight read on whether it will get you what you need, whether or not it ever comes to us.