Data killed the creative brief, and data can save it

By James McDonald (left), director, Audience Group

Stop for a second. Think about beer. Now, sing me a beer jingle. Go.

I can remember so many beer ads from when I was a kid growing up in the eighties. They all had different jingles, characters, stories and art direction and yet – looking back – they were all the same. They were all about working up to that beer moment in your day and then drinking a beer. To put it another way, they were all about promoting the category, each with their own distinctive way of doing it.

I can remember my first creative briefing at a proper agency. I was a young account exec about to brief an ancient creative team (they were over 40!). I can remember the fear. I was worried that they would take one look at the brief, tell me that there was no insight, that the proposition was dull and then ban me from the creative department. I still get a little bit of that fear every time I have to brief.

I spent a lot of time honing my brief writing skills. I got very good at organising the information and getting clients to sign them off before I trundled into the creative department. Over time my briefs began to stipulate so many inclusions, branding guidelines, market segment preferences, focus-group-identified-elements etc. that I had left the creative teams with nowhere to go. I was killing creatively by creating neat little strategic boxes. I was even killing great ideas that, in hindsight would have worked, because they weren’t “On Brief.”

My briefs sounded a little something like this: the car ad must show a blue car driven by a brunette mum with two kids (one baby, one in public school) wearing a pastel top and drinking coffee. I was complicit in delivering a watered-down message that “works because the research says it works”. Using a tone that “works because market segmentation says it’s the right fit”. I helped create some of the most boring ads in history. But hey, my clients loved my briefs.

The more data I had, the tighter the brief. The tighter the brief the more beige the work was. Too much information led to too much strategy, too much strategy led to crap work that required lots more media behind it.

Now, finally, data combined with analytics is helping to sift through this information and discard most of it. We have more information, more data than ever, and we can use it to loosen up the brief. The more I look at the sales results of our clients, the more I see that people buy what’s available to them. Advertising’s role is to increase the mental availability of a product so that more people are likely to choose it when they are in category. The best ads take a brand’s distinctive assets and insert them into a generic category story in an interesting way. So all a brief needs to tell you is, what are those category moments and what are the brand’s distinctive assets?

Ignore all the useless information. Write a loose brief and get out of the way to let creativity happen.

Oh and bring back the jingle. I can feel a XXXX a coming on…