The Strategic Document Every Business Needs to Know: The Brief

Dec 4

A Lesson in Graduate School

It was my first day of Graduate School at Boston University for a Dual Masters in International Relations & Communication.

Our professor, a retired very important Government Person - with past US Army and high-profile International Ambassador roles, put us into groups of 3 and gave us an assignment to complete in 2 hours.

It sounded so simple!

Take a series of real life policy documents, field reports on a significant geo-political event and turn it into a 1-page, ideally ½ page bullet pointed BRIEF with a summary of the situation, relevant data points and 3 recommendations on how the reader could move forward with the current information.

Our group poured over the documents, highlighted sections and argued over what was most important.

Then we handed in our document for review.

Each group came back after 10 minutes full of red marks. We all got failing marks.

Why?

Because we focused on the wrong part of the assignment.

The Wrong Focus

We were so stuck on finding the right facts, important data that we didn't spend enough time or put the right effort into coming up with 3 key recommendations.

Our biggest fail of all was in our summary of the situation.

We did that part fast, it seemed easy!

The feedback was the summary of the situation. It is the most important of all. It is what defines how significant of a threat this situation is. How seriously it should be taken, how many resources should be poured into it.

It was our job to state the situation based on the facts and data we had reviewed and consider WHO would be reading this. Our summary and language in the SUMMARY is what would decide which of our recommendations carried more weight.

Understanding Your Audience

The lesson was, the reader of this document doesn't care about the middle part (FACTS & DATA).

The person we are writing this brief for (audience) has 1 minute to read the situation overview - it needs to be non-technical, easy to understand and highly relevant to their job and decision-making, impact role of the problem/solution.

They then have another 1 minute to read the recommendations and choose the 1 of 3 that fits what they can accomplish and that matches the information they have that we weren't aware of on what fits the end goal of the bigger assignment.

They might be reading this document walking down a hallway between meetings, while shoving lunch in their face, as they sit down on Air Force One for an emergency flight to another emergency. They don't have the gift of time or to dig into the details, that is our job.

Once they scan the brief, we needed to be prepared to answer if asked:

What was our #1 recommendation and have the facts on hand to back it up. We might be asked for them or maybe not - but the preparation should be there to help us bring forward the right POV.

This is the 1-lesson I learned from my program. Your BRIEF is everything.

My job is to spend the time doing the research, understanding the nuances, evaluating the data, knowing how to back it up with data points and then to synthesize it into highly relevant recommendations that make sense for the person in front of me.

A Second Story: The Brief in Big Business

Now for a second story about the brief document format.

This time the stakes are a bit different, we aren't talking about National Security level briefings being read by important government officials. This one is about big business.

Investments of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in agency fees, media spend and eventually product sales.

This was my first week at a big Ad Agency job in San Francisco, working on the Global Team for a Fortune 500 brand's global account list of their 35 international brand portfolio.

My first assignment was to read through the active creative briefs from our sister-agencies in various countries - Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Mexico, Panama.

Each was for the local version of the same cleaning product brand. Every creative brief included the product, the features and benefits the ad needed to communicate, consumer insights from market research, an ideal customer demographic and psychographic overview and the types of creative needed for the campaign.

Each was 1-pager with very succinct information. At first it looked laughably simple, but anyone who knows how hard it is to edit and pare back the essentials will understand that there is a lot of skill that comes into being simple, clear and concise.

My next training was to watch and spend time studying the :30 and :60 second ads, print pieces, and billboards that those briefs became after being in the hands of the creative team and production department.

It was so fascinating to watch the transformation from words on a page to an ad that truly answered the brief - full of creativity, unique storytelling, interesting visuals and I could see how each ad truly spoke to the features/benefits and audience insights.

The Brief Becomes My Guiding Process

The creative brief became my new best friend! Here I was again reliving the importance of BRIEFS.

My entire 20-year career from grad school to ad agencies, media companies and tech, all converge on the same theme.

How to condense and articulate large amounts of information, research and data into key points that match our key objective, while still tapping into essential consumer insights.

That is what gets our ideal recommendation chosen, that's what builds trust with customers and that is what leads to our goals from awareness, to conversion that bring about sales and business growth.