Back in the day, we would have something new every month as a mini campaign on our brand homepage, either tying into an overarching campaign or being a standalone one. Looking at our campaign calendar, I noticed I lacked content for a month in quarter 2. The go getter in me picked up the phone and dialed my account director over at the digital agency of record. My message to him: “Dude, I need something for June, needs to be fun, on brand and I have X amount of budget. Can you please come back with a proposal 4 days from now?” It panned out, the agency came back with something fun and doable which in the end even got us some awards. We had a close bond and the agency was fully motivated to create exciting work for us. But, in the words of Top Gun’s Kelly McGillis: “The encounter was a victory, but we show it as an example of what not to do.”. What you want to do is properly brief an agency.

I’ve seen these gargantuan piles of text which needed to resemble a brief. All they did was take huge amount of time to put together, go through and decipher. Briefs aren’t long for a reason: they’re brief. The key is to convey to an agency what you want them to do, to what target audience and with what goal in mind. No one, especially everyone else around you, is waiting on huge briefings they need to get through where you demonstrate your longing to become the next John Grisham. Couple of pointers to remember:

Do not ask an agency to run your business, ask them for creativity. Agencies cannot be held accountable for running your business. They do not own the P&L, they do not make the choices on what services or products to produce, do not run supply chain etc. etc. They do create amazing creative work to make your business look good.

Ask them to work against a key goal, not try to fix everything on your plate. Too often marketers dump a plethora of goals – marketing business and communication on their respective agencies. The thing is, you cannot have the cake and eat it. Pick one or create another brief to tackle the other goal.

Brief and feedback in person. Agencies are not mailboxes where you can just dump things in a clinical way. You need to explain the nuances of the brief, take them through your thought process and expectations. Feedback over the mail can become very harsh as it is always different how you write something versus how one reads it. Make the effort, it pays off.

Manage the timings. Sounds like an obvious one, but you get most out of everyone if you create time for concept development, feedback and iterations. Especially as in most cases, you need to run the proposals internally yourself. Don’t let yourself get caught in “feedback end of day” kind of situations. Also do not call agencies on Fridays at 6PM to get something done for Monday morning. Been there, done that. Most cases you do not make a lot of friends with this.

Having some sort of a briefing template creates uniformity, consistency and installs a way of working. What emphasis you put on one element versus the other may rely on your personal preference and goals. I could go on for another while, but I won’t.

I wanted to make it brief.