Calm Mediacentre

GOOD BRIEF = BETTER WORK

A brief is the most important piece of information issued by a client to an agency. It’s from the brief that everything else flows. Therefore it’s essential that every effort be taken to prepare the best possible documentation of what is required.

It’s in the nature of creative thinkers that giving them the tightest of parameters will often stimulate the most inventive of responses – and 79% of clients and agencies agreed that: “It is difficult to produce good creative work without a good brief”. Im sure the Calm creative team wholeheartedly agree!

The client brief can be considered the platform for a communications campaign. The better a company’s corporate or brand position is defined and the more thoughtfully its key business issues are described, the more likely it is that strategic and creative thinkers in agencies will be able to apply their specialist skills to produce great solutions.

“The whole idea is to stimulate the creative imagination, not to restrict it. Ultimately you are buying creative ideas. Procurement people can sometimes write briefs as though they were buying copper piping or paperclips. But selling is an art. It’s more like briefing an architect. We need agencies to feel inspired so they can do their best work.”

© IP for this article is fully reserved by ISBAthe IPA, MCCA and PRCA, who have co-authored and produced the above.

Great guerrilla idea: To illustrate how easily cars can get scratched, Accent Panel & Paint in Auckland, New Zealand utilized cards that looked like lottery scratch tickets.

Unfortunately the agency is not known otherwise I’d have linked to it…

I love The Apprentice for it’s cringeworthy characters, their hapless delivery (or non-delivery as the case may be), and their boardroom lynchings (and occasional disembowelments courtesy of each-other not to mention The Great Man).

But it worries me that the methods preached by Sir Alan - especially where the marketing and advertising are concerned – seem to be a tad archaic in the age of web 2.0 and the ethos of getting up-close-and-personal with customers.

It’s all about advertising in the traditional mould – TV adverts etc… (why when we’ve all got sky plus and iPlayer? who doesn’t fast-forward the ads)? Unfortunately this is still how a lot of the big corps think it’s done as illustrated by Sir Alan.

Wednesday’s episode was a great exercise in the use of Personas – each team developed a rounded individual that represented the potential buyer of their perfumes. A good start to getting to know your audience that did appear to be anchored in a teeny bit of user-testing…

…In a real-world scenario this could have been developed into a real conversation with potentially millions of future customers using a whole host of tactics that don’t even come close to matching the budgets that traditional mass media demands. When Alex and Helene were asked how the dinky split bottle idea would impact the bottom line, and the advertising budget, they were flummoxed!

They could have taken a leaf out of Proctor and Gamble’s viral marketing book and reached millions of potential customers, in this instance, teenagers virally, through their “Tremor” advocates – a network of teens recruited to chat about their products to their mates. .

Or indeed, apply some guerrilla-style tactics like Carlsberg: USA – moles going into bars asking for Carlsberg (the barman never heard of it)! and a couple of days later a Carlsberg salesman arrives…; Fake Passports;  £10 notes … the genius is endless.

* This thought was developed after inspiring discussion with the DECTATOR, who is the source of much knowledge (being omnipotent and all that).