HOW TO BRIEF YOUR AGENCY (IF IT WAS US)

‘Better briefing will produce better results faster and at lower cost. It’s not a business option but a business imperative.’ So far so good. But what is a better brief?

There’s a popular idea (even propagated by the likes of the IPA), that a good brief is a complete one. That you, the client, should arrive with the category mapped, the audience defined, the insights dug out, and the problem neatly framed, all ready for the agency to execute.

It sounds efficient, for sure, but it’s also where a lot of work starts to go pear-shaped.

Because marketing is not a closed system. It doesn’t behave like engineering, where the problem is stable and the variables are known. It behaves more like the weather. Patterns emerge, change, collapse. What looks like a clear signal is often just noise in a PowerPoint.

So when a brief arrives fully formed, it usually isn’t clarity. It’s compression. A complex commercial reality squeezed into something that feels manageable inside the business, and in that compression, things get lost or don’t get found.

The brief becomes shaped by internal pressures like what stakeholders want to hear, what can be measured easily, and what has always been assumed to be true. ‘Our audience is loyal’, ‘We need deeper engagement’, ‘We’re targeting a premium segment’.

From our perspective, the brief is not the answer. It’s the starting hypothesis and like any hypothesis, it needs to be tested before anything is built on top of it.

Because the pattern, over and over again, is brands misdiagnosing their own growth problem. They brief for tighter targeting when the real issue is lack of reach, they chase engagement when the brand simply isn’t salient enough to be chosen and they focus on ‘loyalty’ when the market is mostly made up of light buyers who barely think about them at all.

Accept the brief at face value, and you inherit those errors. Challenge it, and you create value. Most agencies answer briefs, but we diagnose them.

So if you’re briefing us, strip it back. Don’t spend weeks trying to perfect the narrative. Don’t worry about presenting a fully-formed ‘strategy’. Don’t try to second-guess what we want to hear, just tell us what’s not working.

What’s the commercial pressure?
Where is the business stuck?
What have you tried that hasn’t moved the needle?

That’s the brief.

From there, our job is to step outside the system you’re in and look at it without the same constraints. To separate signal from noise. To work out whether the problem you’ve identified is the real one.

Because if you already know exactly what needs to be done, you don’t need an agency, you only need a production company.

If you’re not entirely sure you’ve got the right question, that’s where we come in.

We’ll do the heavy lifting, the category reality, buyer behaviour, competitive dynamics, how your brand is actually being encoded in memory, and where the real growth levers live. Not as a theoretical exercise, but as a practical foundation for what happens next.

In other words, you bring the tension, we’ll bring the truth.

And somewhere between the two, we’ll find the work that actually moves the needle.

Don’t brief us on what to do.
Brief us on what’s not working.