It’s already January. The intoxication of December’s magical happiness fades. Blue Tuesday is looming. You buckle up and start hammering away at those crafty plans you concocted in September. Maybe August. That summer campaign needs to get going, and so does an idea for Christmas. But you need more alignment, and other stuff gets in the way. Business happens, and before you know it, it’s already February. Okay, no worries, still only February. But then the realization kicks in that this one only counts 28 days, 29 if you’re lucky. Damn, gone. So, you sail into March. People start getting worried, frantically wanting to get campaigns up and running.

Agencies get briefed (hopefully in person, not over the e-mail) and you think you’re out of the woods. But no, the agency wasn’t sure after internally reviewing, postponing it to the week after. Week after, the agency presents its first thoughts (April is knocking on the door like the big bad wolf in the fairytale with those pigs). Oops. It’s not what you had in mind. Or you didn’t like it. Or it really sucks. Or a mix of the previous ones. Either way, they need to get back to the drawing table. You tell them this and send them a firm email depicting the need to get the campaign sorted. They need another two weeks. How? Why you wonder, maybe even yell at them (don’t yell at them). This is what they do, right? You brief and they conjure up some creative magic.

They come back to you with another proposal, maybe they’ve knocked it out of the ballpark, maybe it’s only so so. Even though you were hoping and praying for the former, you ask their strategist to make you two slides to rationalize why you have the solution to the campaign. You need to get going. You start drinking the sand with the lack of water. People internally get onboard. PPM this and shoot that. You air a campaign that’s okay. It’s nice according to your mother. It’s why Madonna didn’t get the part in the Bodyguard because of her reaction to Kevin Costner’s “It was nice” comment on her concert show. That kinda nice.

Even though a brief should be brief and not a long, the period of campaign development isn’t always brief. It’s quite often long. And it doesn’t consist of briefing and waiting for magic to happen. Lot of times, it takes multiple sessions, relooking the brief, approaching it from different angles. I once spend two months having coffee every morning at my ad agency to talk over a campaign, cause it was hard work to get where we wanted to be. It takes time. Development is a long. Make sure you brief you xmas campaign a year in advance, and every other major campaign you’ve got planned. It’s not a recipe for success, but most likely it results in less drinking of sand. Less stressful, more fun. Better memories. Not nice, but amazing.