How to Develop a Strong Creative Brief: Key Steps for Success in 2025
A well-crafted creative brief is the foundation of any successful project, whether it’s a marketing campaign, video production, or product launch. It ensures that everyone involved in the project is aligned with the goals and vision and they create work that aims to achieve that. In this guide, we’ll break down how to develop a creative brief that helps guide your projects to success and helps everyone involved in the project do a better job.
Let’s dive in!
Here is an example of a terrible brief, that a music company once received for composing a track for a commercial spot. Can you see why is it so bad?
What is a Creative Brief and Why is it Important?
A creative brief is a document that outlines the goals, target audience, key messages, tone, and expectations for a creative project. It’s essentially the blueprint for the project, providing all stakeholders with a clear understanding of what the job is about, its objectives, and how it should be executed.
Why is it so important?
Clarity and Direction: It provides a roadmap for the entire team, ensuring everyone understands the objectives and how to achieve them.
Consistency: A creative brief ensures that everyone, from agency to the production company, works toward the same vision and maintains consistent messaging.
Time and Cost Efficiency: With clear guidelines, teams spend less time revising, allowing for a more efficient process and avoiding costly mistakes. Less chances of “fix it in post” type of scenarios.
how to put together a creative brief in steps:
When writing a creative brief, certain key elements must be included to ensure it serves its purpose. These are the building blocks that will guide your creative team toward success:
step 1: Project Overview
The project overview gives a concise description of the project’s goals, the desired outcome, and the key objectives. This section sets the tone for the rest of the brief. It should also include the company’s details, and the Project Lead. Your project should have ideally one project lead that has the power to make decisions. Otherwise when time is tight and decisions need to be taken, you’ll have to wait 1-2 days for people to get back to your emails before they’re able to sign off something.
step 2: Target Audience
Understanding the target audience is critical for creating effective content and spots. Include demographic information such as age, gender, location, interests, and pain points. This will help tailor the creative approach to resonate with the audience. It’ll also allow us to avoid subjective decisions and judge our creative work based on a specific person’s view, our ICP as it’s known in marketing (Ideal Customer Profile.)
step 3:Key Message
This is the core message you want to communicate. It should clearly define the value proposition or call to action and be compelling enough to grab the audience’s attention. It might be a tagline or just what you want to accomplish with the assets, to be a huge success.
We often ask those 3 things: What do you want your audience to…
Feel
Think
Do
step 4: Tone and Style
Setting the tone and style ensures that the final output aligns with the brand’s voice and resonates with the target audience. Define whether the tone should be formal, casual, humorous, serious, etc.
This is something that for established brand you can understand through their extensive brand bibles but also the multiple assets they’ve created in the past. They usually want to strengthen their brand consistency unless they have hired a new CMO or go through a rebrand, then a fresh perspective is required.
step 5: visual references
Visualisation is a very subjective process, as it’s heavily influenced by imagination which in its own term is influenced by your stimulations over a whole life. That’s why we should never stay in words. Including some visual references that are close to what you’d like to achieve is very helpful for everyone.
Tips:
They can be from direct or non-direct competitors, brands from a whole different market or even something from the entertainment space like films, tv shows, even a random YouTube video.
The reference doesn’t have to work as a whole. It might be that you only liked the pacing, the editing, the art direction or maybe a single visual technique.
The more the better. It helps the creative team to pull together ideas that are achievable within your budget and timeline. It will also help manage your expectations as you might not be aware of how much the production of a certain video costs, and have much higher expectations than what your budget can afford. Then you can either reconsider or fight with your finance team to secure more money for the project.
step 6: Budget and Timeline
Clearly state the budget for the project and the timeline for completion. This section ensures that expectations are set around costs and deadlines, helping the team work efficiently.
step 7: Deliverables and Deadlines
Outline the specific deliverables expected from the team (e.g., videos, print ads, social media posts) and the deadlines for each. This helps keep the project on track and ensures timely completion. Write down everything you’ll need, there is no “that’s not much work, so it doesn’t worth mentioning.”
step 8: Get Stakeholder Input
Once the brief is drafted, get input from key stakeholders, including clients or senior team members. Ensure the project brief is aligned with everyone’s expectations before moving forward. The amount of times we’re halfway through the campaign to realise that a major decision maker from our client side hasn’t been involved until now, and has a very different opinion to what we have planned…
(of course we’ll change everything.)
The client should be involved in the whole process.
They should feel special about what we’re producing and see our collective vision come to life.
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Creating a Creative Brief:
Even though a creative brief is crucial to success, it’s easy to make mistakes if you’re not careful and especially if you try to do it as quickly as possible without getting input internally. Here are a few common mistakes to avoid:
Vague Objectives
It’s tempting to be broad, but vague objectives lead to confusion and misaligned expectations. Be specific about what you want to achieve. At the end of the day we produce videos that will bring commercial results and we want to ensure they’re in the right form. That will give you more power to secure bigger budgets next time and we can produce together something even better.
Overloading Information
While it’s important to be thorough, too much detail can overwhelm the team. Keep it concise and focused on what’s essential to guide the project forward. Also, do a cross-check that the information is aligned and you don’t request contradictory points at times.
Ignoring the Target Audience
Not defining the audience properly can lead to ineffective messaging. Always ensure the audience is well-defined to tailor the project accordingly. I know you don’t want to leave someone out. But strategy is sacrifice. And to increase our chances of hitting a home run, we have to be strategic.
Unrealistic Timelines or Budgets
Setting an unrealistic timeline or budget can result in rushed work or poor-quality outcomes. Be realistic and transparent about what’s feasible.
It’ll also waste your time and opportunity to find a good partner as creative teams won’t take you as seriously.
Lack of Stakeholder Collaboration
A creative brief is a collaborative effort. Failing to get input from key stakeholders early on can result in miscommunications and revisions later.
Wanting to do too much
You won’t achieve everything you want with one video. Even if you spend money for it that seems too much for you currently. Have a clear objective for every single asset, and judge its performance based on the objective you set. Otherwise you’ll end up achieving a little bit of everything, which in the business world, means pretty much nothing.
Best Practices for Effective Creative Briefs
To create a creative brief that truly works, keep these best practices in mind:
Keep it concise: A creative brief should be easy to read and to the point. Avoid overwhelming details.
Use clear language: Don’t use jargon or overly complex language. Make the brief simple and understandable for all team members.
Make it visually engaging: Use bullet points, headings, and even images to break up the text and make it more digestible.
Ensure alignment with the brand: Make sure the brief reflects the brand’s values, voice, and goals, not only the project’s lead subjective opinions.
Include room for flexibility: While the brief should set clear expectations, leave room for creative interpretation where necessary.
Share it with everyone: Ensure that all relevant team members, including external collaborators, have access to the brief.
Conclusion
A strong creative brief is the foundation for a successful project. It aligns the team, sets clear expectations, and ensures that the project stays on track from start to finish. By following the steps outlined in this guide, you can develop a creative brief that empowers your team and leads to better outcomes. And if you find it really hard then ask your selected creative team to help you put it together.
At Storyflow for example we have our own brief template and we have many times sat down with the client to help them put together a brief for the project that they align with. Saying that, we do it only when we’re guaranteed the job. It’s a bit unfair to put a brief for you, while not getting paid for it, only to see you using it to find another team to work with.
If you want to work together and you’ve an idea for a video you’d like to make as a brand then email me at john@storyflowe.com
