Katniss Bowles' Blogger: Announcing Visually’s New and Improved Creative Brief

Mastering the Creative Brief

Shocking as it may seem, many creative marketing projects get kicked off without strong strategy to back its execution. At best, many of these projects have an ambiguous scope with vague expectations between the client and the talent. The outcome – an arduous and expensive creative development process with too many iterations and depleted momentum. So, how do you avoid this blunder?

We went back and looked at past projects that did not do so well and an overwhelming reason for the lack of success was the brief. We decided to revamp and are excited to share our Creative Brief. We believe a great brief leads to imaginative and persuasive marketing campaigns and helps you get there quickly.

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How will the new brief help ?

Capture more and relevant information from clients to deliver better content faster
Gather critical project information ahead of the project kick-off so that the talent team has all the critical information to start projects and avoid project delays.
Better talent matching for each project.
Customize and adapt questions based on add-ons, such as Journalist, style upgrades and more

Dive into the details

We decided to divide and conquer the new creative brief by breaking it into 6 strategic sections. Here is a just a taste of what you can expect from our new and improved brief:

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Objective: This section outlines the business objectives and is a concise introduction to the goals, measurable objectives and any relevant works
Creative Inspiration: This is where you can really communicate what you have in mind for your project. With sets of finely curated thumbnails for styles relevant to video and graphic design, including illustration, technical design, information design and data art. Clarifying the visual language through these examples as early as possible and explaining what you like about them will help your team nail your design.
Audience: This section asks for socio-demographic information to better understand the end user or audience. The goal is to drill down the unique selling point – ‘what’s the single most important thing we want the customer to know?’
Execution: The questions in this section help capture the essentials details around launch and distribution – how and where your content will be used? These are the most common questions that pass between the creative teams and clients, so we’ve collected them here to jumpstart the process.
Existing Materials: Here we ask for documents, links, and brand guidelines to get the job done right. Sharing these essentials as early as possible avoids headaches down the line.

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Your Creative Brief will act as a compass to your talent team as they bring your project to life. It should include all the resources and detail needed for your team to begin work. So what will you put in your creative brief? To get you fired up about filling out your next brief, here’s a killer checklist we put together to make sure you’re creating yours with the most constructive information to make your project a success!