Briefing · Research & handbook
Four in five marketers think they are good at writing briefs. One in ten agencies agrees. That is not a difference of opinion, it is a measurement error. And it shows up on your invoice.
80% of marketers think they are good at writing briefs. 10% of agencies agree. 78% of marketers think their brief gives clear strategic direction, against 5% of agencies. Respondents in the global BetterBriefs research estimated that up to 33% of the marketing budget is lost to poor briefs and misdirected work. In the UK follow-up, marketers put that at 26% of their own budget.
The cause is not laziness. It is that 60% of marketers use the creative process to work out their own strategy. So the brief goes out before it is finished. Which you fix with eight elements, two fewer meetings and one night's sleep on the text.
1 · The perception gap
In 2021 the BetterBriefs Project ran the study nobody dared to run: they asked marketers and their agencies what they thought of the same briefs. 1,700 respondents, more than 70 countries, research partner Flood + Partners, launched at the IPA's EffWorks Global. The largest study ever on the subject, and immediately the most painful.
The results read like a couples therapy session in which one party thinks everything is going marvellously.
Source: BetterBriefs Project, Global Report 2021, published via the IPA. Hard data
Look at what is happening here. The gap is not 10 or 20 percentage points. It is 70 to 76. That is not a difference in taste. That is two groups of people looking at the same document and seeing a different document.
And it is not that agencies complain on principle. On the importance of the brief both camps agree completely: 89% of marketers and 86% of agencies think good creative work is hard without a good brief. 90% of marketers and 92% of agencies call the brief both the most valuable and the most neglected instrument a marketer has. Everyone knows it matters. Everyone does too little about it. The brief is the dental floss of marketing.
There is, incidentally, a watertight way to know which side of that gap you are on: it is not about your opinion. It is about your agency's. And that is exactly why you never hear it. Agencies do not tell you your brief is bad. They say “thanks, we will get to work on it” and call an internal crisis meeting.
2 · The bill
This is the figure everybody stumbles over, and whose source everybody misquotes. So, precisely:
The difference between 33% and 26% is not a contradiction. The global figure is an estimate by all respondents together, marketers and agencies. The UK figure is what marketers say about themselves. In other words: if you filter the agencies out and let only the client estimate, more than a quarter still remains. That is the figure you use in your board meeting, because nobody can dismiss it as agency whingeing.
Percentages say little until you put them on your own budget. So:
| Annual marketing budget | At 26% lost | At 33% lost |
|---|---|---|
| €100,000 | €26,000 | €33,000 |
| €250,000 | €65,000 | €82,500 |
| €500,000 | €130,000 | €165,000 |
| €1,000,000 | €260,000 | €330,000 |
| €2,500,000 | €650,000 | €825,000 |
Worked example based on the self-reported loss percentages from BetterBriefs UK 2022 (26%) and BetterBriefs Global 2021 (33%). No Benelux benchmark available There is no equivalent research into brief quality for Belgium or the Netherlands. Treat this table as an order of magnitude, not as accounting.
On a quarter-million budget you are therefore talking about 65,000 euros spent producing work you will not use. That is not a budget line. That is a junior marketer, or one and a half campaigns, or the entire media budget of your weakest quarter.
The money does not vanish in one go. It leaks away in rounds. From BetterBriefs' BetterIdeas research (2025, over 1,000 respondents in the US, the UK and Australia, with WFA and IPA as partners): marketers report an average of 5.0 feedback rounds on creative work, agencies 4.8. Five rounds. On work that set off from a brief which 5% of agencies thought gave direction.
Put an hourly rate on that. An extra creative round on a mid-size campaign quickly costs 20 to 40 agency hours across concept, revision, presentation and internal alignment. At a common Benelux agency rate that is 2,500 to 5,000 euros a round Informed estimate. Two avoidable rounds per campaign, four campaigns a year: 20,000 to 40,000 euros of work nobody ever sees.
And that is only the money. The time, the mood and the goodwill of your agency appear on no invoice at all.
Writing bad briefs is the most expensive way to make advertising. Sir John Hegarty, quoted in the IPA/BetterBriefs guide The best way for a client to brief an agency (2022)
3 · The cause
Here is the heart of it, and it is not what most people think. The problem is rarely the layout of the template or the absence of an inspiring insight. The problem is that the brief leaves before the strategy is finished.
60% of marketers use the creative process to work out their own strategy. They send the brief not to give direction, but to find direction. The agency becomes an expensive form of thinking out loud.
And it is getting worse, not better. In 2021, 57% of marketers and 81% of agencies thought the creative process is used to work out strategy more often than it used to be. In 2003 that was 35% and 79%. Among agencies the feeling has stayed stable, at a high level. Among marketers it has risen by 22 percentage points in eighteen years. So strategy is increasingly borrowed from the agency, and then charged for as if it came from the brand.
Mark Ritson, who wrote the strategy half of the IPA guide, sums it up in one sentence: 95% of marketers give no strategic direction to their agencies, for two reasons. They have no strategic clarity themselves. And when they do have it, they fail to get it into the brief.
On top of that, the skill is barely taught. In Australia, the BetterBriefs data showed that half of marketers never received any training in writing briefs or in the briefing process. It is also rarely appraised, never measured, and mentioned in no job description. The most important document a marketer produces is the only one nobody ever taught them to make.
Almost three quarters of marketers say themselves that their briefing process could use more structure. That may well be the most hopeful figure in the whole dataset: the perception gap is about quality, not about willingness.
4 · The handbook
What follows is the practical core. It is based on the seven writing principles from The best way for a client to brief an agency, the guide BetterBriefs made with Mark Ritson and the IPA, plus one element that is explicit in the Belgian Pitch Guidelines by UBA, ACC and UMA and stays implicit in the guide: who decides.
The division into eight is IKAg's. The underlying principles and figures come from the sources at the bottom. We say so, because an article about clarity that blurs its own provenance is an article that misses its own point.
One rule up front, and it is not negotiable: if there is no well-defined marketing strategy, there is no brief. There is a wish list.
Not “we need a campaign for the autumn”, but the problem or the opportunity the creative work has to solve. A good brief is sharp on that one point and works as a compass for the thinking. If you cannot explain in two sentences why this work should exist, it probably should not exist.
Briefing is binary thinking. Recruiting new customers, trading existing customers up and raising purchase frequency are three different assignments. They exclude each other within one brief. If you have to do two, write two briefs. That is not extra work, that is half the rework.
The classic symptom: the brief that goes to the agency after five departments have “just added something”. The brief by committee. It contains everything, it asks for everything, and it delivers nothing.
Objectives are the most critical and at the same time the worst worked-out part of almost every brief. In the global research, 61% of marketers and 71% of agencies named objectives the most important element of a brief. It is also the element agencies fall off at most often.
Work in three layers, and make sure they hang together logically:
The backbone of your brief is the triangle of objective, audience and budget. They are locked together. Halve the budget and your audience shrinks and your ambition drops. Whoever wants to brief a national audience on a regional budget is briefing a disappointment.
“Everyone” is not an audience, and according to Ritson “millennials” is actually proof that you do not have one. A usable audience description is meaningfully different from the population, big enough to reach your objective, and the brand has a credible reason to win those people.
The hard figures here are sobering: only 38% of UK agencies say they find a clear audience description in the briefs they receive. Fewer than four in ten. And some clients do not know precisely either.
A message is never stronger than the truth beneath it. A single-minded brief contains exactly one core message. That message is not a baseline, it does not try to be creative, and it is not a shopping list. It only points at where the creative solution has to sit. The proof points beneath it are relevant, few in number and checkable.
Use ordinary words. Only 5 to 7% of agencies think the briefs they receive contain clear, concise language. Jargon, hollow verbs and words that can go in any direction are not nuance. They are postponement.
Budget, timing, mandatory elements, legal restrictions, channels already fixed, things already tried that did not work, and the sacred cows you must not touch. Constraints do not limit creativity, they aim it. What does kill creativity is a constraint that only turns up in round three.
The budget belongs in there. Yes, in a pitch too. The Belgian Pitch Guidelines by UBA, ACC and UMA explicitly ask for brand context, budget, expected deliverables, evaluation criteria and the decision-makers involved in the brief. An agency that does not know your budget guesses. And a guess costs you a round.
This is the element almost everyone skips, and it is exactly where the rounds come from. Only 30% of UK marketers have clear evaluation criteria. And from the 2025 BetterIdeas research: only 10% of all respondents say ideas are always judged against clearly defined criteria. 15% of marketers and 23% of agencies say the brief is always used when judging the work.
Read that last one again. The document that is supposed to steer the work is not on the table in eight out of ten cases when that work is judged. Then the evaluation is no longer an evaluation, but a taste test with a changing jury.
So agree in advance what you judge on, and with which document. Good criteria help an idea grow, they are not a checklist for shooting it down.
The element that appears in no standard template and that does the most damage in practice. Who approves? Who advises but does not decide? At what point does the CEO join, and have they seen the brief? How many rounds are planned, and who consolidates the feedback into one voice?
The classic: three rounds handled smoothly, and then the managing director looks at it for the first time in round four and says it is “not their thing”. That is not a creative problem. That is a diary problem disguised as a creative problem, and it costs you two weeks and an agency that no longer trusts you.
Keep it short. 54% of agencies find briefs too long, 32% too short, and only 14% just right. Everything that does not steer belongs in the appendix.
Write and rewrite. The first version is never the best. Sleep on it. Give it to someone outside your team and ask them what the assignment is. If they do not know, neither will your agency.
Do not write the solution. A brief that already contains the answer is not a brief but a purchase order. If you know exactly what you want, you are ordering production, not thinking. That is allowed, but say so.
5 · The briefing session
The brief is the document. Briefing is what you do with it. A good brief that goes out by email on a Friday evening with “let me know what you think” is a missed opportunity in two moves.
The brief itself does not have to be creative. The briefing session may be. That is your chance to push the agency into the problem: show them the shop floor, let them hear the call centre, have them use the product at the time of day customers use it. Bring someone who is not the person who wrote the brief. Never brief alone.
And then the most important rule: briefing is only done when the agency says it understands. Not when you have finished talking. Ask them to restate the assignment in their own words. If that does not work, it is the document, not them.
A brief only becomes a contract when the agency accepts it, incidentally. From that moment, responsibility for the problem shifts to them. That is a fair deal, but it only works in one direction: an agency that accepts an unclear brief out of politeness buys itself a problem. And you an invoice.
6 · Counterargument
True. The BetterBriefs research measures perceptions, not briefs. Nobody analysed 1,700 documents. The 26% and 33% are estimates by respondents, not accounting measurements. That does not make them worthless, but it does make them indicative.
Why it still counts: the perception gap is itself the evidence. If sender and receiver are 70 percentage points apart on the same document, the communication has failed. Regardless of who is right.
The research is set up from the briefing problem, and agencies get off lightly. In practice they too often accept briefs they do not understand, out of fear of seeming difficult or losing the assignment. BetterBriefs says it themselves: agencies should say no more often to briefs they do not get.
The 2025 data also shows that judging ideas is shaky on both sides. 30% of marketers and 27% of agencies think they are well trained in evaluating ideas. That is not a one-way problem.
A good brief strongly improves your odds, but it does not buy good work. There are excellent campaigns from messy briefs and average campaigns from exemplary ones. The brief is a necessary, not a sufficient condition.
The real argument is economic, not artistic: a good brief lowers the number of rounds, the lead time and the rework. Even if the creative does not get better, it gets cheaper. And usually it becomes both.
7 · Action
8 · Accountability
We label what we use, so you can judge for yourself what you pass on.
Hard data comes straight from published research with a known sample. Informed estimate is a calculation by IKAg based on our own data or public figures. No Benelux benchmark available means there is no equivalent research for Belgium or the Netherlands and that you are using a foreign figure as a guide, not as proof.
Cite this article
IKAg (2026). Your brief is not as good as you think. www.ikag.be/briefing/onderzoek
IKAg (2026). Your brief is not as good as you think. Retrieved from https://www.ikag.be/briefing/onderzoek?lang=en. Underlying data: BetterBriefs Project Global Report (2021), UK Report (2022) and The BetterIdeas Project (2025).
Free tool
Twelve questions, six axes, four minutes. You get a score, your three weakest spots and a template that follows the eight elements.
The tool asks for your email address, because we keep your score so we can have the conversation about the axes where it pinches for you. This article you read without filling anything in.