Pippa Nixonโ€™s Post

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Brand Communications for Ambitious Businesses ๐Ÿ—ฃ๏ธ Founder and MD at Scoop

Have you been briefing your agencies all wrong? Yesterday I had the absolute pleasure of joining The Marketing Academy for a session with BetterBriefs. One of the most important tools in our portfolio, an excellent brief should deliver excellent results... a bad brief is just, well... expensive. To break it down: โœ A good brief is rarely easy to write, and it's not linear. Forget your shopping list, instead think jigsaw puzzle where you keep adding to the final picture. Sometimes there's a clear picture of what needs to happen, but there are occasions where it might take longer to uncover. โœ Briefs should be clear (well duh), scrap the marketing jargon, set SMART objectives, and keep it concise โœ Keep it brief. The word brief literally means short in Latin. If it's not clear in two pages, then it's probably not clear full stop. If you need to, attach an appendix with additional background info, category context, and if you want to include creative thought-starters then you can add them here too. โœ Don't present problems as opportunities. A problem is a problem, and only clarity on what is really happening will let your agency help solve it. โœ It is the responsibility of a good brief to provide clear direction, but it should leave a runway for the agency. Prescriptive briefs don't leave space for creative solutions. โœ Watch out for the 'brief killers', the generic words that can be applied to a huge group, that come up in briefs again and again. Make a list of vague words that come up, and ban them โŒ โœ And finally, a brief is not a briefing. A good briefing gives a better understanding of the brief and allows your agency to ask questions and interrogate the task in front of them. A good briefing injects the energy and should inspire. Looking forward to putting my new thinking in place, and helping clients' new & existing help brief better so that we can keep driving those results ๐Ÿ“ˆ Big thanks to Matt & Pieter-Paul for the insight. Image by Tom Fishburne

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Emma Bird (previously Bacon)

Runs The Marketing Academy Global Virtual Campus Program. Experience in blue chip organisations: Microsoft, SSE & Mitsubishi

2mo

Pippa Nixon - thanks for sharing your learnings with your network. I'm really pleased to see that you have learnt so much! ๐Ÿ˜€

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