Mastering the Creative Brief with Pieter-Paul von Weiler and Matt Davies

Drew McLellan [00:00:32]: 

Hey everybody. Drew McLellan here from agency Management Institute bringing you another episode of Build a Better Agency. And you’re going to love this one. This is a topic that I suspect all of you have talked about, thought about, been frustrated by, and we’ve got some answers for you. So I’m excited about that. Before I tell you about our guests, I want to remind you that although it still feels like summer, fall is right around the corner and one of the things that we know every fall brings are our AE bootcamps. So our advanced AE bootcamp, that’s for count people who’ve probably been in the business four or more years, that’s September 18th and 19th. And our introductory level AE bootcamp for people who have less than four years of experience, project managers, account coordinators, associate AES, younger AES, that is October 16th and 17th. So you can learn more about those workshops by heading over to the agencymanagementinstitute.com website under how We Help Find Workshops. And you’ll see both of those workshops. These workshops get rave reviews. We get five stars over and over and over again. They just keep getting better. It’s a great way for your AES to not only learn from our adjunct faculty, but also to learn from other account people across the country and the world that are doing the work that they’re doing. So it’s a great way for them to network, connect, get some new ideas and get some new skills. So check that out. All right, let me tell you a little bit about our guests. So Pieter Paul Von Weller and Matt Davies were strategists at an agency and they were super frustrated by the lack of good briefs coming from clients and also struggled with creating good briefs inside the agency. And so they launched a research project which led to some very interesting results. I’ll let them tell you all about it, but let’s welcome them to the show and dig in. Gentlemen, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us today. 

Matt Davies [00:02:34]: 

Thanks for having us, Drew. 

Drew McLellan [00:02:35]: 

You bet. Do me a favor, introduce yourselves and tell everybody the backstory of how you came to have this depth of expertise in what I think is a very painful subject for probably clients and I know for agencies. Briefs. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:02:49]: 

Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, thanks for having us. Yeah. So Matt and I are two ex agency strategists. We’ve been writing a lot of briefs, we’ve overseeing lots of briefs, we’ve been approving lots of briefs. And after about 15 plus years we said to ourselves, why are there so many poor briefs landing on our desks from. And we’re talking about the briefs coming from the brand into an agency. No matter where we worked in Amsterdam, in London, in Shanghai or in Australia, no matter the category that we were operating in. B2B, B2C, FMCG, governments, cars, doesn’t matter. Poor briefs seem to be everywhere. And we asked ourselves, are we haunted? Are we cursed? Is it us or is there something bigger going on? And we started to look into the matter and we quickly discovered that the topic of client briefs or marketing briefs, there’s several names for the same thing, was very lightly researched. Nobody had really looked into the matter. A little bit of research back in the UK in the early 2000s and that was about it. So we started to fill in the knowledge gap and we said to ourselves, why don’t we look into this matter more, didn’t we, Matt? 

Matt Davies [00:04:01]: 

Yeah, we managed to. Well, we engaged our research partner in the uk, Flood and Partners, awesome research company, do research a little bit differently. We got a sample of almost 1700 respondents, or just over 1700 respondents, actually 945 from marketing side of things and almost 800 from the agency side of things. So we’ve got a really robust view of what’s happening with briefs, where they go wrong, what are the key elements of briefs, what’s important to get right and more importantly, how both sides view this really important document. So yeah, it was, it was really interesting for us to get going. We’ve since started a business called Better Briefs off the back of this research because it has been such a rich and deep topic for lots of people. So, yeah, really keen to share some of that with you. 

Drew McLellan [00:04:42]: 

So talk a little bit about the research. What surprised you the most when you invested in the research, got the data back and you did. It was a big study you had. I’m trying to find the data, but it was thousands and thousands of respondents. This isn’t like a hundred people. So 1700. Over 1700 respondents from 70 countries, 944 from marketing organizations and 786 from creative agencies. So this is not, this is not a. We talked to 20 people and now we’ve decided some things. You guys delve deep into this. So what surprised you the most? 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:05:17]: 

I guess what surprised us the most is the utter disconnect, the utter lack of alignment between a marketeer and an agency when it comes to all things brief. And when we say all things brief, there’s a lack of alignment on what a good brief looks like, there’s lack of alignment on what strategic direction in a brief looks like, there’s lack of alignment on who the target audience is in a brief. And basically this lack of alignment is causing a lot of confusion. So just to give you a couple, marketers think they’re really good at writing briefs. Agencies don’t believe so. I think the opposite. And we’re not talking about 5 or 10% differences here. We’re talking about 60, 70% differences here. Big deal. To us now, a brief should be the summary of all the thinking a brand has been doing. Right? It’s not the start point of the thinking. It’s the end point of all the strategic planning and all the wonderful stuff they’ve been doing. So we asked both marketees and agencies, do you think your brief contains clear strategic direction? And 78% of marketeers say, yeah, my brief contains clear strategy direction. 

Drew McLellan [00:06:29]: 

Right. Of course they did. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:06:30]: 

Of course they did. Of course they did. And agencies responded to that exact same statement with 5%. Only 5% of agencies are clear on the strategic direction in the brief. Now, drew, take that 5% and reverse it. It means that 95% of agencies are unclear on what the strategy is in a brief. Now, how can you ideate, how can you come up with ideas if you’re not clear on the strategy? 

Drew McLellan [00:07:00]: 

Right? 

Matt Davies [00:07:01]: 

We’ve been in this situation. This is a situation where we’ve taken a brief and it happens. Agencies don’t often like to admit it, but it happens. You walk away from that meeting and no one from the agency society is actually clear on what the client has briefed you on. You walk away in kind of hushed tones and you say, are you clear on that? Are you clear on that? No. Okay, well, let’s just take it back to the agency, muddle through it, try and work out what the client wants, and then hope for the best. 

Drew McLellan [00:07:26]: 

So who was right? Were the marketers briefs good enough and the agencies were wrong? Or were the agencies right that the clients, the brands, their briefs were not what they should be? 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:07:38]: 

I think it’s the wrong question who’s right and who’s wrong? Because both parties need to do better here, coming up with great ideas. Can Only happen in partnership. You need each other. A brand needs an agency to come up with ideas. An agency needs a brand to give a direction what kind of ideas it wants, and it needs money to fund them. So it’s not always right or who’s wrong here? Both parties need to do better. So marketeers need to do more work to make sure that their agencies understand what they’re being briefed on. And agencies, and we talk about that in a second. Matt, a little bit more. Agencies, they need to say no to briefs that they don’t understand. Let me repeat that. Agencies need to say no to briefs that they don’t understand. And the opposite happens way too often. 

Matt Davies [00:08:30]: 

Because a brief is like a contract. A brief should act as a contract between the two parties. And a contract is only a contract until both parties agree to it, agree to the terms of that contract. So if you say yes as an agency, you’re walking away with a passive agreement on a contract that you don’t believe in. And so you should be held responsible and accountable for the work offer. Unclear brief. 

Drew McLellan [00:08:49]: 

So why are they so bad? 

Matt Davies [00:08:52]: 

Why is the relationship so bad? 

Drew McLellan [00:08:54]: 

No, why are the briefs so bad? 

Matt Davies [00:08:57]: 

I think to Pieter Paul’s point that it’s not necessarily that all the briefs are bad, I think there is a lack of understanding of what a good brief looks like. I think briefs are often used as internal stakeholder alignment tools. They’re not designed for the recipient, so they’re not designed for creative agencies, media agencies, design agencies, whoever you’re briefing, they’re not designed and they’re not setting them up for success. So what we’re finding is that there is a lack of target group, you know, definition in briefs. There is an absence of objectives and what the picture of success looks like. We know that both agencies and marketers say that, you know, objectives are the most important element of a brief, but we’re not spending enough time to design them in the right way. And understand at the end of this campaign, how do we know if we’ve achieved what we’ve set out to achieve? 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:09:42]: 

And I think there’s two more things there. There’s plenty of space to hide when you’re. When a marketer is dealing with marketing strategy, right, marketing strategy, talk 50 pages or 40 slides, you can get away with stuff. But the brief is the pointy end where you one or two pages need to summarize all of the strategic choices. There’s no place to hide. So we also see quite often poor strategies causing lots of frustration and confusion among brief Writers. Right. So I’ve been given this poor strategy that I need to capture in a brief. I just can’t do it and it sets off a really negative chain reaction. And the other one is, we know that many marketeers, many brief writers and many brief approvers have not been trained in how to write briefs. 

Drew McLellan [00:10:34]: 

Right. I have no doubt that there are very few people on either side of the equation that have been taught what a good brief looks like and how to create it. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:10:45]: 

Yeah. 

Drew McLellan [00:10:46]: 

And I know that’s part of what you’re doing now. So was part of the. Did you guys go into this research believing you knew what a good brief was and did your opinion of what a good brief is change after the research or after the work you’ve been doing, or was part of what you learned in the research and then the work you’re doing? What constitutes a good brief? 

Matt Davies [00:11:09]: 

It’s a good question. I think we’re fortunate enough to be recognized with lots of industry awards and accolations. So we’ve received lots of FE awards, IPA Effectiveness awards, APG awards, and not saying that every time that we were awarded with our clients for a particular campaign, it started with a good brief. But we understood by the end what sort of brief we would have liked if we were to set that campaign up for success from the start. What does success look like? Pieter Paul’s been an FE judge in Australia in APAC for 10 years, has read who knows how many thousands of cases. Pieter Paul. So I think we’ve got a fairly good idea of what agencies need to get to good work. And so that, along with having trained our clients whilst agency strategists, agency leads for years and years, sort of set us up with a really good grounding. 

Drew McLellan [00:11:57]: 

So that leads to a great question. So, you know, you have said a lot of agencies accept briefs that are not adequate, and I would guess in some cases they’re anxious about saying to the client, you didn’t do your homework well, and they also don’t want to look stupid. Like, I should understand this and I don’t, and I’m sure there are lots of other reasons. How does an agency. How do you recommend that an agency train their client to write better briefs? 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:12:28]: 

Well, let’s take a step back. Let’s zoom in on that situation that you just described. An agency is in a situation where they’re taking a brief and there might be contents of that brief that they’re unclear on. How do you deal with that? Well, one of the things you can do is in a Polite way, say, sorry, I’m not clear on the content of this brief. And it’s important that we clarify this because if I do accept this brief and start working on it, it will set off a very negative chain reaction affecting a much larger group of people. So one thing, one easy trick to get the client to realize how important it is to get a brief right, is to add up and do together with your client, add up all the people that are impacted by a single brief and start on the client side, start, start with the brand. Right? How many people get involved in writing the brief? How many brief contributors do we have? So people from the inside team or from the product team or from the sales team might have little bits of the brief that they contribute to. How many people get involved in approving a brief? That number easily is somewhere between 5 and 15 right now. How many people from agency side get involved? Start with the creative agency, then go to media AC, social content, PR shopper, etc. Design strategists, account managers, copywriters, art directors, artworkers, designers, media strategists, specialist buyers. That number is always so much higher than anybody ever realizes. 

Drew McLellan [00:14:09]: 

Right. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:14:10]: 

So sorry, we have to get more clarity on this brief because if I don’t stop it here, the amount of people and the amount of hours and the amount of billings and the amount of money and the amount of energy will go up significantly. So it’s better that we clarify here, right here, right now, then we let it pass. Sorry, Matt. 

Matt Davies [00:14:28]: 

And if you’re. And if your client doesn’t care what happens on your side, some of them don’t. Sometimes we’re engaged on a project by project basis and the client might say, hey, that’s your problem. I’m going to give you this input and you’re going to do the best you can with it to come up with some great ideas for my business. Remind them that up to 30% of their budget could be going to waste as a result of their poor brief that they’re writing. That was a massive finding from our research. So their marketing budgets could be reduced by 30%. Marketers are saying that if I put a poor brief into the system, what I’m getting back is shallow creative thinking. I’m going through these additional rounds of work. We’re settling for work that isn’t going to be as effective in market and it’s wasting 30% of my budget. So that’s the opportunity. Right. And that’s the conversation that your client might sit up and take notice of. Yes. The number of People and just the sheer impact on their marketing budgets so they don’t have to go out, put their hand out to the CFO anymore saying, I need more money. How about we get the money that we’re using working harder for us? Yeah. 

Drew McLellan [00:15:22]: 

That may be the difference of them keeping their job or not. Right? 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:15:25]: 

Absolutely, Absolutely, absolutely. Because way too much work out there is completely ignored by everyone and it’s setting money on fire. 

Drew McLellan [00:15:31]: 

Right. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:15:32]: 

But think about who you write the brief for. Right. Marketeers and brands write briefs for agencies. They don’t write it for themselves. It might feel sometimes that way when there’s difficult internal approval processes. But the brief is there to serve as a springboard for the agency to guide and inform their thinking to get them going, to get to an idea. So if the agency isn’t clear on it, how can they get to ideas? So it’s not written for the marketer’s own glory. 

Matt Davies [00:16:02]: 

Yeah, we’ve seen this often. It’s a great point, Pieter Paul, that the brief is the first time that a marketer has thought about a project. It shouldn’t be that way. There should be the strategic thinking that has been aligned through an organization before. Pen, his paper on a brief. And briefs are used as strategic alignment documents. And you know, that’s not their purpose. 

Drew McLellan [00:16:21]: 

I have to say I was stunned in your research that, and this was an answer from the agencies that 55% of the briefs they get have no clear objectives or outcomes. So I grew up in the agency space as a writer. I don’t even know how I would tackle a project if I didn’t know what I was trying to get the audience to do. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:16:41]: 

Yeah, like it’s, it’s really simple, but it’s, it’s hard to get. Right. But it’s really simple. Right. Brands invest in marketing to drive better business results. So that should always be the starting point for the picture of success. What does the contribution of advertising, of the idea deliver to sales or to. To what you’re trying to do to ebit. Now, to do that, you need to influence behavior. People need to shift away from a competitor. People need to spend a little bit of time with you digitally or they need to trial your product. In order to get them to do that, in order to change behavior, something needs to shift in their minds or in their hearts. They need to think or feel differently. And that’s the starting point. That’s what we control with the idea the most. Right. The mind and the heart. But those three levels of objectives should always be clear and they should always be linked. And that’s quite hard for marketeers to link business outcomes to attitudinal shifts. But we all need to be clear on it, and our research is very clear on that. If there’s one component that agencies are screaming out for to be clear and right and understandable, it’s the objective section. 

Drew McLellan [00:17:56]: 

So let’s go back to the earlier question. So I’m, I’m an agency leader of some kind, I’m sitting with a client, I get a brief. So again to your point, saying, all right, I’m not clear on this and it’s super important that we get clear right now because otherwise dollars get wasted, people’s time get wasted, we have to re brief the deadlines at risk, all of those sort of things. I get that that’s about making the client more aware of the importance of the brief, but how do we actually help them do it better? 

Matt Davies [00:18:27]: 

Briefs are a series of choices and those choices rely on each other to make sense. So a good brief needs to articulate and convey one strategy. 1, 1 job to be done, one challenge to overcome, one problem to solve that problem to solve should lead to, as Pieter Paul said, some really clear linked objectives. Business, behavioral and attitudinal. We need to define our target audience in a really rich way. We can’t have pages and pages of segmentation going into confuse creatives and agencies on who the target audience is. We’ve seen that go wrong so often. Targeting everyone or targeting someone, you know, an audience that’s so narrow. What is the message that we want to communicate? How do we make sure that we’re single minded in that message, that message is going to be applicable to that target audience, is going to help overcome that challenge that we’ve set. And what are the reasons to believe that we live within that business as well. So there’s, there’s elements of a brief that are non negotiables and everyone needs to have a look at those briefs. And there’s lots of fluff in briefs. If you haven’t had a conversation with your client partners on what information you need from the brief, then we suggest you do that to start with because lots of, lots of marketers are transferring information in briefs they think are right. But again, as responsible people within agencies, you need to understand what info you need to get the work done. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:19:42]: 

Yeah. So don’t wait until a live brief. Schedule a meeting with your clients and have an open conversation about what you want and what you need from the brief, the document and what you need from the briefing, the meeting, transfer of the information. They’re two different, completely different things. Educate them what you need, what you want from those two elements, the brief and the briefing, so they can better cater to it. Now, hardly ever are these conversations had, because when we talk about briefs, there’s always a screaming deadline on them, and it’s always rush, rush, rush, push it out the door. Instead of taking some time and reflecting. Another thing you can do is not wait until the client shows up with the brief. You can proactively offer. Hey, we know you’re finalizing your marketing strategy. You’re starting your brief planning. Is there any way we can help with you? So that’s especially maybe an opportunity for strategists, but go early on, preempt briefs, and help your clients shape the briefs in a direction that you want them to go. 

Matt Davies [00:20:48]: 

One of the findings from the research, we asked agencies whether they thought their clients had a good understanding of what they need from a brief. 80% of creative agencies feel that marketers have a poor or limited understanding of what they need from a brief. Are they just sitting there passively, not having that conversation with their client? Hey, you don’t know what we need from a brief, But I’m not gonna tell you. I’m gonna let you kind of muddle around, and we’re just gonna take the information and our ego is gonna think that we can solve it. When you get back to the agency, to Pieter Paul’s point, you need to have a conversation with. With your marketing counterparts because it is in partnership that you get the best results. You know, an agency shouldn’t work like magicians. They shouldn’t be able, you know, turning something into. Into something else without the appropriate input. 

Drew McLellan [00:21:29]: 

So do you recommend an agency provide a sample brief or a template or something like that to help a client frame it up, or is that insulting to a client? 

Matt Davies [00:21:40]: 

I think working with the client, I think, you know, it’s not necessarily one template as one size fits all for all agency clients. I don’t think you can say, hey, this is our agency template that we want all our clients to fill in. But I think having a conversation with each individual client, because they’re all nuanced. When we design templates for brands, they’re different. Yes, they contain a core set of ingredients, but what sits around those ingredients, how those ingredients are framed, how they letter into each other is nuanced. So it’s not just, hey, here’s our agency template to every client, off you go. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:22:12]: 

Because it needs to link in with the, with the language and principles of their marketing strategy. And that’s different from organization to organization. Another thing I would say, Drew, is before maybe you find it a bit hard to say, hey, client, you don’t understand what we need from a brief. That’s why all of this research, everything we do is free to download. It is there as a conversation starter to point to. Look, there’s this global research that points out there’s a massive disconnect between marketees and agencies when it comes down to briefs. Let’s have a look at the stats. Now. Can we talk about our relationship and how there may be some areas of improvement? Blame us, use us. Use our research as a bit of a conversation starter because that’s what we designed to do. 

Drew McLellan [00:22:58]: 

We need to take a quick break, but when we come back, I want to flip the coin a little bit and talk about when the agency writes the brief. Are we any better at it? What can we do to be better? So let’s take a quick break and then we’ll talk about the other side of the coin. Hey everybody, thanks for listening today. Before I get back to the interview, I just want to remind you that we are always offering some really amazing workshops. And you can see the whole [email protected] on the navigation head to how we help. Scroll down and you’ll see workshops and you can see the whole list there with descriptions of each workshop. They are all in Denver and we’ve got them throughout the year for agency owners, account Execs, agency leaders, CFOs. We have a little something for everybody. No matter what it is that you’re struggling with, people, new business, money, all of those things we’ve got covered. So check them out and come join us. All right, let’s get back to the show. All right, we are back with Matt and Pieter Paul and we’re talking about marketing briefs and how important they are to both brands and agencies and yet how woefully inadequate they often are. And so before the break, I said I wanted to chat about if we are creating the brief for a client. So what did you find in your research and in your work? When we are the origins of the brief, are we any better at it than our clients? 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:24:19]: 

I think let’s start with really separating the two briefs because they serve two very different purposes. Right. So a client brief or a marketing brief serves as a springboard to get an agency going. It’s there to guide and inform its thinking. An agency brief internally is a summary of of everything that is in that client brief or marketing brief and is almost the first step towards a creative idea. It’s not a creative idea yet, but it’s, it summarizes that marketing brief in half a page max. And if you go agency briefs or creative briefs as these documents are called, that are two pages or more, that’s not good enough. They need to be way shorter. I was working at Saatchi’s and you had four lines, that’s it. And they’re the first step in the creative direction where the solve is. So the strategies already makes choices. So they’re two very different documents. So when they work well and there’s lots of confusion and there’s lots of creative briefs being written as well that don’t add any value but distract. 

Matt Davies [00:25:31]: 

Yeah, I think it’s, it’s also. So if we look at the marketing brief, the brief from the client. I remember as an agency strategist sometimes getting sucked in to the world of the marketer and the market is saying, hey, look, you know, you guys know what you need from the brief? Why don’t you shape the brief for us or write the brief for us and then we’ll approve the brief and then you can get going on your creative brief, whatever that looks like. It’s a really dangerous thing to do. There needs to be a delineation between the two. There needs to be an ownership and a level of responsibility taken by the marketer. So a marketer needs to get their brief 80, 90% down before they bring in the agency. We’re all for collaboration in this process. We’re all for agencies help, you know, helping shape, you know, the last 10, 20% of a brief to make it tighter, make it more refined, make it more interesting for our marketers. But we shouldn’t be taking responsibility for the brief. They should be writing. We just don’t know enough about, you know, the business context. You know, it means we have to be working really closely with their research and insights team. It means we have to be working really closely with their product teams, whatever that looks like, that should be their job. So yes, we can be guiding the process. We can be helping refine the process. And by the process, I mean the actual document. But we need that level of separation. We need that buy in from their side that this is the information. We need the choices to be made from them rather than us make the choices. Because as agencies during those, those times, it would come back to bite us. Now this is what you said, but we disagree now that we’ve got into seeing creative work. So we don’t want the client using the creative process to clarify their strategy. Their strategy has to be set before they engage the creative agency. Otherwise we’re going to spin wheels. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:27:05]: 

I think it’s sometimes helpful to go outside of our category. And when you go outside of the category and think about the use of a brief, let’s go to architecture and interior decorating. The clients has a certain brief. Hey, I want three, four bedrooms. I’m going to use it in this or that way. And I want you as an interior decorator to make the absolute most of it. There are certain requirements and things you can’t do and certain things I absolutely love. These are needs and my wants. Hey, beautiful novel at the advert audience. And I want you to show your bringing your expertise and do the absolute best. It needs to be a little bit more separation in the world of marketing and advertising between the expertises that we have and the expertise of the AC is to come up with ideas. So that’s what we just should be focusing on and not in the marketeer should be focusing on the strategic choices in the strategy. And I think sometimes we need to be separated. More like going to the doctor as well. Right? You go to the doctor and you describe the symptoms, what you’re suffering from. You don’t go to the doctor with thought starters on how you want the solve to be. Right. Well, things are changing now with AI but hey, let’s just stick in with that doctor’s example in the past. 

Matt Davies [00:28:19]: 

I think the other thing just, just to pick up is which brief is being used to evaluate the work. At the end of the day, is it the brief that the market has written or the brief that the agency writes? Um, and this is a real point of contention that we find in a lot of the relationships that we, we’re privileged enough to, to be involved with is the marketers write a great brief. They turn up to that first creative presentation with their brief in hand. The agency sits on the other side of the table and they’re recapping a brief that they’ve written. As Pieter Paul mentioned at the start of this, this segment was around the interconnectedness of those two briefs. They should work, you know, hand in glove, of course, but unless you’re in an agreement on which brief you’re using to assess the work, then there’s going to be confusion. So, you know, some agencies don’t like to share their brief with their clients, which is perfectly reasonable. But in that instance, the marketer will be holding their brief up. If they have seen no other brief, they’re going to be holding their brief up. So you as an agency also need to be accountable to the brief that they’re reviewing the work against. If you are in the practice of sharing your creative brief that you write internally at the agency with your clients and they approve that brief, again, which is up to each individual agency, then that brief which is then closer to the work should be used to then assess the work. So again, it’s a really interesting intersection and where confusion can reign if not discussed in the right way. 

Drew McLellan [00:29:38]: 

Did you come up with a root cause of why we’re not good at this? Do we not put enough time in on the brand side? Are they not getting enough input from enough different people? Is it. Again, I know we’re always so deadline driven that they are in a hurry and they do it last minute. I cannot imagine a brand wants to spend a lot of money and have the agency fail. That is a recipe for losing your job. So if it’s this critical and this important, as you guys now go into brands and help them get better at this, what do you observe? Changes that makes them better? Is it that they just don’t know any better? What’s your observation on why this isn’t as good as it could or should be? 

Matt Davies [00:30:23]: 

Unfortunately, we get into engagements with organizations and their strategy is not up to scratch. Let’s start there. The strategy is not up to scratch. It’s all over the place. There’s multiple priorities for that year, which is fine, but they’re not broken down into certain initiatives and each initiative having that focus that it requires. So multiple strategies finding their way into a brief. Trying to do too much with a brief is a symptom of a lack of strategic thinking and clarity before pen hits paper on a brief. So that’s the first thing I would say. There’s lots of other process issues that sit around that like the right people signing off on briefs. We know that doesn’t happen enough. The person who signs off the brief should sign off on the idea. That doesn’t happen. It’s a simple, simple thing. A lot of organizations think that they can catch creativity before it does any, any wrongdoing at the creative presentation phase. We don’t, we don’t, don’t worry about the brief. The brief is dry and it’s 75 pages and we don’t want to have to approve that and it’s made no decisions. But when the idea shows up, we can all have a point of View. So more rigor, more rigor around the brief, more time and attention, as you say, but making sure that strategy is 100% clear. If you can’t communicate that strategy, marketing strategy into a distilled briefing, one or two pages, the choices aren’t clear and. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:31:37]: 

I think we’re setting the wrong priorities. Why do you write a marketing strategy? Why do you write a client brief or marketing brief? You do all of that hard work to come up with an idea ultimately that influences people. But for some strange reason we get too distracted with marketing strategy, thinking, internal priorities. What really, really matters is not the brief, it’s the idea that’s going to make the difference in the real world, that’s going to influence people’s behavior, influence people’s thoughts, influence people’s attitudes. So we need to put more focus on what the outcome is, the idea. We need to give that more time and attention in life and work back how we set it up for more success. Because mind you, the vast majority of ideas out there are not working. They’re being completely ignored by everyone. So you’re basically setting money on fire. The industry is setting the vast majority of their investment on fire. 

Drew McLellan [00:32:42]: 

Yeah, again, underscores the importance of it. So the two of you, when you were in working in agencies, you wrote, I am sure, many, many, many creative briefs off of a marketing brief from a client. And what was your secret to success in writing a great creative brief? When you were handed a marketing brief and let’s assume the marketing brief is good, what did you need to do with that document to create the creative brief that would deliver award winning work? Because what you’re saying is two page document down to half a page or less. So what was the mental, what was the thought process you went through to distill that down to give your team what they needed to knock it out of the park? 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:33:28]: 

I think for me it’s always been a quite intuitive process where you, where you look at the landscape, what is going on, what is going on with the competitors, what are they owning in people’s brain, what are the strengths and weaknesses of your product or service or brands and then what’s going on in culture and the target audience and where’s the opportunity there? And that’s different every single time. 

Drew McLellan [00:33:52]: 

Right. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:33:53]: 

When you mix that together, something will come up after some, some good thinking and then the most important thing is does this work? Does this brief work for the creative director? I would always check my briefs. Hey, can you springboard of this? That’s the important thing right Is this a perfect springboard to ideate from? And if it’s no, then you had to go. I believe you have to go again if it’s not a good springboard for creatives. Briefs can either completely distract everyone. Creative briefs, this is right inside ac they can completely hinder creators and be utterly ignored by them and they just do their own thing. Or they can help them. I’ve seen a lot of creative briefs absolutely hindering creatives instead of helping them. And what they’ll then do is they’ll ignore the brief and come up with their own ideas and then there’s a more of a disconnect between what the client wants and what the credit is have come up with. So always check in. Hey, creative director, is this working for you? Can you springboard of this? 

Matt Davies [00:34:52]: 

I also think that the first brief, the first concept presentation for any client, any new client is not going to be the, the best, most award winning work. It takes time to build trust between client and agency. It takes time to understand the creative ambition or to build a shared creative ambition with your client partner. So it takes time and by the time that you’ve understood that, that shared creative ambition, you’ve understood what you want to push against. What is the disruption that you’re interested in? I’m not talking about complete disruption. Like what are the conventions of the category you want to break or you want to challenge or you want to find interesting spaces in. That takes time. Right. That’s not going to come off the back of one creative brief. So once you’ve got there, once you’ve set that creative ambition with your client, then creative briefs become really easy to write because you understanding together where, where the interesting space is and taking creatives on that journey as well from the start is important to people’s point because once you get that direction, once you get that momentum, once you get that relationship humming and you’ve got some wins on the board, then it becomes, it becomes much easier. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:35:59]: 

But we. One thing that we say to our clients, but it completely aligns with agencies as well. We want everyone to write less briefs. We want people to write less briefs so they can invest more time in getting those less briefs. Right? 

Drew McLellan [00:36:16]: 

Right. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:36:16]: 

That lead to bigger, better ideas that I hold on to much longer because we all know we’re, that we move away way too quickly from ideas. Right. They’ve not worn out, we’re just bored of them. Better ideas that we hold on longer to, that’s the aim. 

Drew McLellan [00:36:33]: 

Well, and better ideas that become part of the culture of the audience and become part of their nomenclature and how they talk about either the brand or the category. You know, I think we, in all of our careers we have watched, you know, ad campaigns or creative work that sort of just becomes a cultural icon because it was so good and so spot on. And then those brands don’t have to reinvent the wheel every day. And not everybody’s going to knock it out of the park that way all the time. But. But that is the aspiration. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:37:03]: 

Yeah. Why do we write so many briefs? Why do we. Going back to what you were saying before, why is there such a rush on pushing that brief out and another one, and another one and another one. Less briefs that are better that lead to better ideas? 

Matt Davies [00:37:17]: 

Well, agencies get remunerated based on the number of ideas, not on the longevity of the ideas or the impact of those ideas. So the more ideas they come up with, the more they get paid. So I don’t know, I can come at it from a really cynical perspective as well. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:37:29]: 

And that’s where then result driven renumeration becomes way more interesting. 

Drew McLellan [00:37:35]: 

Right. Which, which is becoming more the norm. Right. Value pricing and we’re getting away from, you know, time and materials and the hourly model is almost completely gone from agencies today. And so I do think that that alignment is getting better. But Matt, to your point, it’s, it’s not perfectly aligned for sure. So what advice do you have for agencies that are listening to this and going, this is my life. This. So this is absolutely my life. And I’m going to print out the report, I’m going to have conversations with clients and when they still get a brief that is not quite what they need in the briefing other than asking questions. Are there other things that you teach agencies that they can do to help clients be better? 

Matt Davies [00:38:20]: 

Marketers are looking for guidance through the survey. There was a question around whether the structure around creative briefing was working for them or not, and they’re admitting that it’s not working. So what that structure looks like is up to each individual agency and relationship with that client to work through. What do you need? Do you need a pre briefing session where the agency is brought up to speed on the nature of the business and what’s happening, do you then need to protect that briefing as a ceremonial session? Do you need to then have a challenge session? Do you need to make sure that you’re buying yourself enough time? We know that marketers don’t always know what happens behind closed doors at agencies. When we were starting out at agencies, we had our junior clients the ones that just started in their organization come and sit in the agency for two weeks and shadow us around the agency. They came to every presentation so they knew what happened. So and protecting that, that ideation space because we know it’s an iterative process. Ideas don’t just come from nothing. So having, you know, so avoiding that, that mid process check in or tissue session or whatever it is that breaks the flow of creativity. So just trying to get that process right. What does that cadence look like? How long do you need informing your marketer that this is why you need that amount of time? I know it’s always difficult because we’re under time pressures. Increasingly we need stuff out the door. But to have that conversation without a brief on the table, without a screaming deadline, without, you know, work on the table was always helpful. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:39:40]: 

And another tip is talk about money. And what I mean by that is start tracking the amount of rebreathers and the amount of rounds that you as an agency go through. Because not every agency tracks that. 

Drew McLellan [00:39:56]: 

Right. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:39:56]: 

Ah, on that project we were rebreathed three times and it cost us eight rounds to get to a final product. The more you have a handle of those numbers, the stronger the conversation you will have. Hey, this is about all of us saving you money. Because if we get to a better briefing, you don’t have to rebrief us three times, but only once or no rebreather at all. We don’t have to go through as many rounds and it’s better for everyone. So keep a really close track on the amount of rebriefs, any amount of rounds or reworks that happen. 

Drew McLellan [00:40:28]: 

Yeah, you’re right. As you were saying earlier, you know, if 30% of your budget is burned through wastefully because the brief wasn’t what it needed to be, that’s a painful reality for clients, especially in today’s economy. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:40:41]: 

And proven. Right, right, proven by our research in the US as well. In the US the number is even higher. 

Drew McLellan [00:40:47]: 

So why do you think that is? 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:40:50]: 

Listen, the Delta US the difference is the lack of alignment between marketees and agencies is massive everywhere. It’s just that when we, when we break the data down a little bit, the US seems to be a little bit worse offender compared to Australia and uk. We don’t necessarily always know why that is. You have a lot of brands, right. So this could be the average of big, medium and small, large country, maybe multiplier effect of not everybody being trained as well. You have the culture. I’ve got a funny accent because I’m Originally. Originally from Holland. You have the culture to be direct with each other, and it’s a good thing, so use it. Right. The English are always quite polite, and that makes it a little bit hard when you’re dealing with something as subtle as an idea. Whereas we Dutch and you Americans are a little bit more direct. So be direct. When we’re dealing with Paul Briefs, spell it out what isn’t working, because it is already in your working culture. And that’s a good thing. 

Matt Davies [00:41:48]: 

No, I think maybe it’s just that, you know, maybe there’s a recognition that the standard isn’t quite as good as it could be. And I think in a competitive environment like the US where you hold yourself to high standards, there is a desire to get better. And so to say, hey, yes, we’re wasting a lot of money, but we want to get better at. At reducing that waste, then, Yeah, I think that’s. That’s all good. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:42:07]: 

There’s one other thing that we sometimes come across in the US and that it’s a bit of a. Everything is. Is an opportunity. Right. Positivity is important, whereas our findings are anything but positive. So it’s. It’s. Sometimes it’s a little bit harder to admit that things aren’t great, and maybe that’s why the US is a little bit worse in the data. That could be another reason. 

Drew McLellan [00:42:32]: 

Yeah. It seems like, you know, when I was reading the research and as I’m listening to you both talk, it also seems like if we have an understanding with a client, that we’re in this together and our goals are really the same, and the more we help each other, the more everybody wins. The client wins. They get a raise or a promotion, the brand wins, it has more market share, the agency wins, it gets to do better work. And I, as the account person or whoever I am the strategist, I get the raise and the promotion. It seems like if we have that kind of a relationship, we should be able to have those candid conversations and be able to talk about how do we help each other look great and do the best work we can possibly do, as opposed to that sort of agency client, sort of weird friction that happens sometimes where it feels like sometimes we’re banging heads more than we’re working together. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:43:28]: 

It should be a partnership, not even a relationship. The most effective ideas, the great ideas come from partnership. You need each other. 

Drew McLellan [00:43:35]: 

Yeah. This has been fascinating. Any final closing thoughts from either of you as we. As we wrap up the hour? 

Matt Davies [00:43:41]: 

No. Just to say thank you for having us. Drew we know that it can look like a daunting hill to climb. You know, leading agencies with, with some of this, you know, these confronting issues that have an impact, they have an impact on, on your budgets, they have an impact on your talent. We see lots of people moving from agencies in house because of the frust frustration associated with some of this stuff. So yeah, all we can do is encourage you to have those conversations whilst they are tricky conversations with your clients that hopefully they are productive. This started from us having the conversation between us. I had a poor brief on my desk. It was a one line brief from a stock listed company that sort of triggered all this. But it’s been, you’ll be surprised at how receptive people are not to point the fingers at them, but to point the finger at the problem and say together we can get better at this. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:44:28]: 

What he said, it’s a partnership. You need each other. And agencies have a superpower. We still have a superpower. And that is to come up with things that nobody else can come up with, which is great ideas. And don’t forget that that’s what it’s all about. The great ideas will deliver a strong positive return on investment. 

Drew McLellan [00:44:47]: 

So before I ask you to tell everybody how to get a hold of you, I just want to tease the audience that actually that’s the topic of your latest study is how do we come up with great ideas? Where do they come from? And so we’re going to have you back on the show to talk about that. But for now tell everybody where they can download the report on briefs and they can track you guys down and learn more about your work. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:45:11]: 

So better briefs.com you can download our global study into the topic of marketing briefs. There is a best practice guide sitting there as well. There’s funny cartoons from our friends Tom Fish in the market Tunis that you can download for free because we paid for them. There’s a compendium there with a whole bunch of global food leaders sharing their thoughts on briefs. And we also have our latest report just launched, the Better Ideas project. You can download that there as well. And it is all for you to start having better conversation around briefs. Blame us. Hey, these guys have done published this research. There seems to be this large lack of alignment. Let’s have a chat about how we can improve. 

Drew McLellan [00:45:55]: 

Yeah, awesome. Thank you both for being here and for talking about this. This is such a critical topic for our future success. I think as agencies, I mean as making the stuff becomes more commoditized, the value of the idea just grows and grows and grows. And it’s really hard to do that if you don’t have the right starter material to be on track. So this becomes more and more critical, I think, to our industry every single day. So thank you for taking on the research and for helping brands get better at this and helping us understand it better. To appreciate both of you being with us. 

Matt Davies [00:46:27]: 

Thank you. 

Pieter Paul Von Weller [00:46:27]: 

Thank you. 

Drew McLellan [00:46:28]: 

All right, guys, this wraps up the episode, so head over to betterbriefs.com, download all of that stuff, start following these folks learn, start having conversations, start internally, start just thinking about what information you don’t get from clients that would be helpful or what questions do you always have to go back and ask that you don’t get in a brief? And by the way, I know a lot of you don’t do briefs very often. Why aren’t we getting the basic information? Why? How in the world do we start without a blueprint of knowing where we’re going and why we’re going there? So, lots of good fodder in this episode, but I feel like it’s just the tip of the iceberg, so you need to be drilling down deeper and thinking about the practices of your agency and how you can help your clients get better at this as well. So head over to their website, download the data. It’s really fascinating. Download the templates and the tools and really do a deep dive on this. Because with AI and with freelancers and all the other things, everything we do is getting commoditized except for the great ideas. And so we have to protect that with everything we’ve got. Otherwise we’re all going to be working at banks. So go get that stuff. Follow up and a huge shout out and thank you to our friends at White Label iq. They are the presenting sponsor of this podcast, so they make it possible for me to bring folks like Matt and Pieter Paul to you week after week after week. So super grateful to them. Head over to white label iq.com ami to learn how they provide White Label design, dev and PPC to agencies just like yours every day. All right, I’ll be back next week with more great guests. I hope you’ll join us then as well. Talk to you then. 

That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of Build better agency. Visit agencymanagementinstitute.com to check out our workshops, coaching and consulting packages and all the other ways we serve agencies just like yours. Thanks for listening.