Getting creative work out of an agency should be easy, shouldn’t it? A creative agency, as its name suggests, should be just that – creative. Why else would they be in business? Their role is to provide clients with eye catching campaigns which get their brand or service noticed, sells product and meets sales targets.
Of course there’s more to it than that. Much more.
For one thing agencies are far more complex animals. As well as the creative team, there are also likely to be a whole host of experts and specialists in planning and research, data and digital strategy, copywriting, media selection and buying, involved in digesting and developing the brief.
Most businesses simply don’t have the structures to employ such dedicated individuals – and that’s another reason you’ll have beaten a path to the door of one particular agency or another – the expectation that all these talented people can help you devise a campaign to make you stand out from the competition. And that’s where it gets really tricky.
What makes a good brief?
The critical document in this process is the brief. At its heart this document is a summation of what you as the client are asking the agency to deliver. But what makes a ‘good’ brief? Surely it ought to be enough to explain where you are right now, say a little bit about your objectives, your target market and product, where it sits alongside the competition, and so forth. Then you can sit back and see what they come up with.
That’s all well and good. You’ll get a campaign. But will you get a really good campaign? The very best campaign that agency can deliver? To do that you really need to think long and hard about just what that brief is trying to achieve. As with many things in life, the preparation is crucial. A little bit of thought now will pay big dividends. So where should you start?
Firstly, don’t be too prescriptive. You’ve come to the agency presumably because they have a track record of outstanding creative work. They’ve been able to demonstrate to you that they understand how to identify and grab an audience – and they may even have won a fair few awards for this. After all, it’s their job to be inventive and creative – not yours.
Unlock their creativity
So what you are trying above all to do through the brief is to unlock their creativity. You want to get them fired up. It’s not your role to tell them that you need an A4 brochure in a particular colour, using particular style of photography, a particular tone, and that it needs to be mailed and emailed out to a core group of individuals you’ve already identified.
Many agencies will be happy to execute a campaign based on such a ‘tight’ brief. Of course they would. But will it really deliver a creative result, something original that cuts through the clutter and gets right to the heart of the matter? I doubt it.
Why? Because it doesn’t play to the strength of a marketing agency – their creative thinking. By leaving so little room for them to work between the lines, by being too prescriptive, you take away the thinking, the enquiry, the independence of thought, and the challenges which all go together to make an agency special. Rather than freeing them to innovate and think through to problem to develop an original solution – you’ve already given them an answer and left them with little room for manoeuvre.
It’s not that the elements of the brief are individually wrong. Background is essential. Those key details about where you are, what customers currently think, the competition you face. These are all necessary. But what you really need to provide is a green light for the agency to go to town on the issues you face as a business.
Challenge the brief
You need to engage them and give them the licence to take on all the information you can give them, add a bit of their own, digest that, throw it around, transform it, and then come back with a single insight from which a very special campaign can be built.
It’s common parlance in the industry to say that an agency should ‘challenge the brief’. Some might find that a little arrogant. Who knows your business as well as you do? But equally ‘assumptions’ don’t make for good campaigns.
A good agency will do its own research. They’ll take your ‘insights’, verify and test them. They’ll bring to bear that wider expertise they possess to delve into the ‘information’ and ‘background’ you have given them. By letting them do this – indeed by giving them permission to do this – you’ll engage them, challenge them, and let them play to all their strengths. What’s more, they are then far more likely to uncover new insights which help them unlock creative ideas which will deliver truly inspirational campaigns. Who knows, they might even surprise you with what they find out.
So next time you’re briefing an agency, step back for a minute. Engage a little bit of objectivity. Don’t be tempted to try to devise a ‘creative solution’ yourself, but leave space for the agency to bring their own original thinking to the brief. Expect – indeed, invite – their active participation into the process. If you do, I promise you that the results will be much, much better – both creatively and for your own business.
Andrew Woodger is planning and data director at The Purple Agency
