The creative brief format most teams use today was developed at advertising agencies in the 1960s, refined in the 1990s, and has barely evolved since. It is a document designed for a world where creative was a TV spot, a brand was a consumer packaged good, and the campaign lasted a year. None of that is true anymore, and the brief as a document has not kept up.
What the traditional brief gets wrong
The classic brief asks for: audience, insight, proposition, tone, mandatories. It produces work that is on-strategy and nine times out of ten, forgettable. The reason is subtle: the brief separates the what from the how, and creativity lives in the how. By the time the creative team sees the brief, the interesting problem has been flattened into a sanitised summary.
Worse, the brief is usually a one-way document. Planning writes it. Creative receives it. There is no structure for creative to push back, reshape the problem, or expose a better angle. Great creative almost always comes from this kind of collaboration — and briefs, by design, prevent it.
What is replacing it
The best creative teams we work with have moved to something closer to a "working session" format. It has three characteristics:
Problems, not propositions. Instead of "the proposition is X," the document says "here is the business problem, here is what we have tried, here is why it has not worked." Creative minds respond to problems, not conclusions.
Evidence bundles, not summaries. Instead of a one-line audience insight, share the raw interview quotes, the screen recordings of users, the sales call transcripts, the comments on your ads. Let creative arrive at its own insight from primary evidence. It is messier, slower, and produces dramatically better work.
Iterative, not one-shot. The brief is not delivered — it is developed. Planning and creative co-draft a loose hypothesis. Creative goes off and makes something rough. Both parties review what the rough version reveals about the problem. The "brief" crystallises over 2-3 rounds, not in one document.
The template
If you want a practical starting point, a modern working brief has five sections:
- The business problem — what needs to be more true 12 months from now? Be specific.
- What we have learned — research, data, evidence bundle. No conclusions, just the raw material.
- Our current hypothesis — where we think the opportunity is, held loosely.
- Constraints — budget, channels we will and will not use, timing, regulatory.
- Success signals — what will we look at to know if this worked? Note: signals, not metrics. Metrics are the agency's problem; signals are everyone's.
Notice what is missing: a proposition. That is deliberate. The proposition is the output of the creative process, not the input. Write it in the brief and you have just constrained the thinking to dressing up a pre-baked idea.
Why this is worth the extra time
The trade-off is clear. The old brief is fast to write, clear to read, and produces predictable work. The new approach is slower, messier, and produces work that occasionally breaks through. In a saturated advertising market, predictable work is invisible work. The old brief is a liability.
Burn your template. Start with the problem.