Mini case · Briefing
Twelve lines. Each one sounds reasonable. Together they cost thirteen weeks, four rounds and an agency that will politely decline next year. We take them apart one by one and then put them back.
This is a composite brief. Every line comes from a real brief we have seen go past over the past few years, but they do not all come from the same one. The company does not exist, the combination does. We do it this way for two reasons: nobody recognises themselves, and everybody recognises themselves.
The context: a Belgian manufacturer of sun protection and screens, forty years old, around 120 staff, selling through a network of independent dealers. Marketing budget around 250,000 euros a year. The marketing manager handles marketing, communications, trade fairs and part of sales support. She has forty minutes to write this brief between two meetings, and that is exactly what you are about to read.
To be clear: she is not a bad marketer. She is a marketer with too little time and no training in writing briefs. That applies to roughly half the market.
Part 1
Sent on a Thursday evening at 18:47, with in the email: “Here is the brief, let me know if you have questions. Presentation in ten days, please.”
Twelve lines, 214 words. Not one line is a lie. All twelve are unusable.
Part 2
What the agency reads: nothing.
This is the company presentation, not the background to the assignment. Background should explain why this brief is on the table now. Something changed: a competitor growing, a dealer complaining, a product launch, a market shift. That “something” is the whole reason money is being spent, and it is not there.
The line “our dealers are our greatest asset” is not background either but a political signal. The agency reads: there will be comments from dealers, and they carry weight. Useful information, wrong place.
What the agency reads: you pick, and we get judged on the other one.
These are two assignments in six words. Building awareness among people who are not in the market, and harvesting leads among people who are, call for different work, different media, different timing and different measurement. One brief, one strategy. If you want both, write two briefs, or say explicitly what the balance is.
There is no number either. “More” is not an objective, it is a direction. A campaign that produces one extra lead has technically succeeded.
What is missing entirely: the commercial layer. What does the business get out of this? And the attitudinal layer: what do people have to think differently before they behave that way? 61% of marketers and 71% of agencies name objectives the most important element of a brief. It is also the element that most often consists of a single line.
What the agency reads: roughly 2.5 million Belgians, budget unknown.
This is not an audience, this is a filter with the mesh of a fishing net. 35 years of age spread, both sexes, and three interests nobody objects to. Who is not interested in comfort?
Only 38% of UK agencies find a clear audience description in the briefs they receive. This is exactly the kind of line that explains why.
What does belong in there: what do those people already know, what do they get wrong, when do they enter the market, how do they decide, and who decides with them at home. A good audience description lets you hear the conversation being had at the kitchen table.
What the agency reads: five messages, so none.
A single-minded brief contains one core message. There are five here, and all five are interchangeable with any other player in the category. Put your competitor's name above this sentence and nothing changes. That is the fastest test there is: if the sentence is also true for your competitor, it is not a message but a description of the industry.
And there is no proof at all. Quality is a claim, not a fact. Twenty years' warranty on the fabric is a fact. In-house production nine kilometres from the factory is a fact. Facts give creatives something to work with. Claims give them a blank page.
What the agency reads: three “buts”, so three fears.
Every “but” in a tone of voice is an internal conflict that has not been settled. Someone thinks it should be younger, someone else fears for the existing customers, and nobody has chosen. The brief then becomes the peace treaty, and the agency gets to fight the war in round two.
Choose. And if you really cannot choose, say why not and who decides. That is more honest and it saves everyone time.
What the agency reads: write a 40-hour guess, for free.
Two things go wrong here. First: the channel list is the solution, not the assignment. By fixing the channels in advance, you buy precisely what you say you want to avoid, namely work that looks like everyone else's. Second: asking for the website “ideally” is a free extra assignment wrapped in a single adverb.
“Surprise us” sounds generous and is the opposite. It means: we have no criteria, so we will only know whether it is good once we see it. That is the direct cause of an average of five feedback rounds.
What the agency reads: somebody is going to be disappointed here, and it is us.
This is the most expensive line in the whole brief. Without a budget, the agency cannot close the triangle of objective, audience and budget. It guesses. Guess too high and it presents a campaign you cannot afford and you lose a round. Guess too low and it presents something tame and you think the agency is no good.
The Belgian Pitch Guidelines by UBA, ACC and UMA explicitly ask for budget, deliverables, evaluation criteria and decision-makers in the brief. Not because agencies deserve pity, but because the quality of the answer is directly tied to the quality of the information shared.
The fear behind this line is understandable: if I say my budget, it will cost exactly that. Also true. But what you buy with that secrecy is the wrong proposal, and that costs more.
What the agency reads: the weekend is cancelled, and so is the quality.
Ten days for strategic and creative work, on a brief with seven open questions. The Belgian Pitch Guidelines advise at least four weeks as soon as you ask for strategic or creative input. Tight deadlines do not save time, they produce weaker answers, and those weaker answers then cost you two extra rounds. So you have not saved the time, you have moved it to the most expensive phase.
What is also missing: working back from the launch. Live in March means production in February, approval in January, concept in December. Put those dates in the brief and the discussion about feasibility is over immediately.
What the agency reads: there is a third objective, and it is filed under mandatories.
A product launch is not a mandatory, it is an assignment. Hiding it here means the agency will be told in round three that the SR-90 should be “more prominent after all”. The same goes for the dealers: if their recognisability is a judging criterion, it belongs with the criteria, not with the logo rules.
Real mandatories are boring and concrete: legal wording, a required certification mark, a language requirement, an existing sponsorship contract. If a mandatory contains an opinion, it is not a mandatory.
What the agency reads: the only clear direction in this document is a prohibition.
This also happens to be the most usable line in the entire brief, and that is the painful part. It is the only thing the client genuinely has a view on. Except: a brief that only says what is off limits steers towards the edge of the pitch and not towards the goal.
Turn it into something you can use: what does that competitor do well, where are they vulnerable, what have they claimed for so long that you can no longer take it from them, and what is unoccupied in the category.
What the agency reads: there are no criteria, so we will be judged on taste.
Here sits the most expensive gap of all. Only 30% of marketers have clear evaluation criteria, and only 10% of the industry says ideas are always judged against clearly defined criteria. Without criteria, every presentation becomes a taste test with a changing jury, and that is exactly how you end up with five feedback rounds.
“Viral” is also not an objective but an outcome nobody controls. It is the marketing version of “we would like to get lucky”.
What the agency reads: someone we have never met is going to turn up and overturn everything.
And that is exactly what happens. In round four the managing director joins, sees the work for the first time, and finds it “not us”. Two weeks gone, a concept gone, and an agency that will present defensively from now on. That is not a creative problem. That is a diary problem dressed up as a creative problem.
Name the decision-makers in the brief, and put them in the diary before you send it. Whoever cannot be there does not decide. That sounds harsh until you see the bill for the alternative.
Part 3
The same six axes as in the Briefing Score. The original brief scores 17 out of 100.
Scored with the IKAg Briefing Score, two questions per axis, each 0 to 3 points. Informed estimate
With this kind of brief you see a predictable pattern in practice. A tally on a campaign of this size:
| Consequence | What happened | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Two extra creative rounds | Round 2 after the SR-90 discussion, round 4 after the managing director | €5,000 to €10,000 in agency hours |
| Four weeks' delay | Live in May instead of March | The entire pre-season missed |
| Free website proposal | Asked for “ideally”, never used | 25 to 40 agency hours, thrown away |
| Weakened relationship | Agency now presents safely instead of sharply | Cannot be invoiced, can be felt |
Agency hours calculated at a common Benelux agency rate. Informed estimate The lead times are typical for this kind of engagement, not measured in this specific case, because this specific case is composite.
Part 4
Not longer. Sharper. Put the two side by side and you see that the second version did not require more work, but more decisions. That is the real difference between a good and a bad brief: a brief is a series of decisions that together form a well-argued case for communication.
New version: 12 points, 398 words. Almost twice as long as the first, and that does not contradict “keep it short”. Short means: everything that steers, and nothing that does not. The first brief was shorter and still too long, because it contained 214 words that steered nothing.
Score of the rebuilt version on the same six axes: 31 out of 36, or 86 out of 100. Not perfect, and it does not need to be. The question is never whether your brief is perfect. The question is whether your agency knows, after reading it, what to solve, for whom, with how much, and how you will judge whether it worked.
A brief is not about writing, it is about thinking. Dave Trott, quoted in the IPA/BetterBriefs guide The best way for a client to brief an agency (2022)
The lesson
Not one line in the first brief was wrong. They were all undecided. And an undecided brief simply moves the decision to later, to more expensive, and to someone who knows less about it than you do.
The exercise you can do today takes twenty minutes: take your last brief, and note next to each line what your agency can deduce from it. Not what you meant. What it says.
The figures on audience description (38%), evaluation criteria (30%), objectives as the most important element (61% and 71%) and the number of feedback rounds (5.0 on average) come from the BetterBriefs Project (Global Report 2021, UK Report 2022) and The BetterIdeas Project (2025). The recommendations on shortlist, compensation and a minimum of four weeks come from the Pitch Guidelines by UBA, ACC and UMA and the ACC Pitch Report 2026. The agency rate used comes from IKAg files. Full source list in the research article.
This brief is composed from several real briefs and anonymised. The company, the brand name, the competitor and all the figures in the case are fictional and serve only as an illustration.
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