Talking about marketing and technology feels a bit trite at this point in time. But it’s also not healthy to stay connected and doomscroll.
If this is your way of switching off, then hopefully the below is diverting. Failing that, do some ironing, cooking, Marie Kondoing. Anything that takes you away from a screen.
Onwards.
Bad briefs are one of the biggest drains on marketing budget. So why are clients so reluctant to try and fix it?
One of the most valuable exercises I’ve ever run with my teams has been an end of year review of our work and campaigns. We’d decamp somewhere and spend half a day critically ranking the past 12 months. Work was either placed as ‘great’, ‘good’ or ‘below average’.
We’d then look for common themes between them. What made the great work great? What would have moved the good work into great work? And what was the common thread between the work we diplomatically clustered into below par?
Great and good work varied. But there is always, without exception, the same underlying issue with the stuff that hasn’t worked: the brief.
Or in some cases a complete lack of brief. Or a brief that had no objective. Or that was so confusing or extremely tactical that we had no hope in hell of achieving anything. Or in other cases, an idea that we as a team had excitedly leapt into without clarifying what our objective was first.
One past client even told me that their department was so advanced they didn’t need briefs. Needless to say the project that followed was an utter cluster***k
I’ve yet to encounter a single marketing team or agency where poor briefing, often for the creative disciplines, doesn’t cause issues in some way, shape or form.
At best, it wastes everybody’s time. At worst, it wastes seriously large amounts of money. 33% of marketing budgets, to be precise.
That stat is just one of many from last year’s Better Briefing report. The survey of marketers in the UK, Australia and the USA is sobering reading.
For example, 80% of marketers surveyed thought they were good at writing briefs. But just 10% of creative agencies surveyed considered the quality of briefs from clients to be good.
That means there is a massive - and I mean massive - number of people working in marketing who are literally flushing a third of their budget down the drain by the simple fact they can’t write a brief.
It’s not just client side. Often brief writing agency side is left to junior account managers. Bad briefs are probably the number one source of inter-agency conflict that I’ve seen between account teams and creatives.
Even when it drops down to small businesses getting a designer or copywriter to do a quick piece of work, the result is anything but.
My wife - a graphic designer - has been known to invent new compounds of swear words on small freelance jobs where the client changes their mind midway through a job that should take half a day. (She’s currently putting together a presentation on how to brief. I’ve heard two new pieces of invective during this period.)
Often the creative is either forced to go back and demand more money or turn in a piece of work that’s worth far more than what they end up being paid, while the client rages against the cost and inability of the designer to understand what they want. It inevitably stems from a bad brief.
This is also not a hard problem to fix. Training new, especially junior staff both client and agency side on how to write a brief is not hard or time consuming, although getting the strategy clear and concise is a lot harder. Articulating the marketing strategy in a way that even junior team members can understand is essential.
Briefing templates are also not hard to create. Most creatives will be only too happy to collaborate in creating these, as it makes their lives easier.
And creating an environment where agencies, creatives and anyone else on the receiving end of a brief feel empowered to push back and make it clear the brief isn’t clear enough is vital.
That’s a bit more challenging, especially in some environments where the culture is less than supportive. But it’s vital that both sides can have an adult discussion around the right approach without taking it personally.
But process, people and training can’t overcome the biggest issue of all, which is a lack of strategic direction client side.
Without a clearly articulated strategy with clear, realistic objectives that help deliver on the strategy, even the best briefing process will struggle to deliver effective work. That’s a whole separate topic in itself, but is probably at the root of the majority of bad briefs.
Mitigating the worst of briefs
Where I’ve roughly ended up at, as a rule of thumb for briefs, is the bigger and more important the brief - for example, the new campaign that will turn around declining year on year sales - the shorter and more concise it should be.
A short articulation of the business problem, brand positioning, target audience, a concise note around the key message, what results this brief is expected to deliver, and by when, plus bulleted media channels this is expected to run in, and not more much.
By all means supply as much supporting material as your need (for example one creative team I briefed got 2 hours of sales calls to listen to so they could understand the customer experience better), but this brief is about what you want to achieve, not showing off what you know. Less is more.
For what I’d call mid-level complex tasks - such as a photoshoot, a series of articles, a month’s worth of social assets - there’s probably a bit more detail needed, as there’ll be specific messages or assets that will be needed, but it’s still important to demonstrate how this ties into the wider strategy, the key message you’re trying to convey, and what the objective is.
This brief is probably a little more involved but as long as the recipient is clear on the purpose of the brief and has all the right supporting information, you’ll probably get a decent job back.
Finally, the quick tasks - for example writing a special offer email, designing a banner advert variation - you can be relatively concise and use a bit of a shortcut.
As long as the key message, target audience, objective and a short description of what you’re expecting to see is present, that should usually be enough for the recipient to work with, although you’ll probably get a few clarifying questions (if the creative you’re working with is any good).
I probably drive my colleagues nuts by insisting the content team, who sit under me, receive clear briefings, and I’ve been known to send briefs back if they’re not good enough. Briefing is one marketing hill I’m willing to die on.
I’d like to think my briefs are good, but then as part of the 80% of clients who are happy with their briefs, I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Credit your creatives
Timing is everything. The day after edition 1 of this newsletter was sent praising Coinbase’s Super Bowl strategy, the company’s CEO Brian Armstrong Tweeted a thread about how the advert was made, claiming “no agency could have done this advert” and was promptly called out by Kristen Cavallo CEO of an agency who did pitched a similar idea to them.
Marketing spats can be quite navel-gazey, but this speaks to a wider issue. Armstrong’s attitude is sadly not uncommon among (non-marketing) clients: when the work is good, the client takes credit. When it doesn’t, blame the agency. Also, Armstrong’s description of the process at Coinbase - assuming there’s any truth in it - sounds like a very chaotic way to work. LINK.
Google’s embraces advertising privacy (sort of)
Google has moved to very slowly turn off the tracking features on Android, albeit less quickly than Apple. That gives companies like Meta a bit of time to work out how to respond, and Google a bit of time to build a system that keeps advertisers who use their adtech happy, given the lukewarm responses to FLOC and its successor, Topics. Brian Morrissey’s newsletter The Reboot notes that DTC brands who’ve built businesses on cheap digital advertising will be the biggest initial casualties, while publishers who have a handle on first party data stand to benefit. There’s a certain irony in Meta facing an existential threat due to not owning their platform, in this case smartphone hardware. LINK - Brian Morrissey.
Venture Capitalists love groceries
Australia’s biggest hyped sector in early 2022 seems to be online grocery delivery for everyday essentials. Milkrun recently closed $75m in funding, competitor Voly had $18m in funding. Their biggest selling points seem to be they’re not Uber Eats and you can get deliveries in 30 minutes. Neither Milkrun or Voly are profitable and the margins for grocery delivery are incredibly slim, plus this is a sector with some very big supermarket players with deep pockets who do understand margins on every product. Lots of businesses (Amazon, Samsung) seem to be spending a lot of time working out how to make it easier to order a low cost item for relatively affluent people that can generally be purchased in a short walk. LINK - ABC,
Moderating the metaverse
Buzzfeed News created a conspiracy world in Horizons (Meta’s metaverse) that broke most of Meta’s rules but was allowed to stay up. Meanwhile, BBC News created an account for a 13-year-old girl in VRChat and was invited into strip clubs, groomed and threatened. VRChat might not be a Meta product, but is accessed through Meta’s hardware, so becomes a Meta problem. Content moderation is hard enough outside of VR and most companies working on VR platforms don’t seem to have factored this in beyond allowing users to block people, which hasn’t exactly worked out brilliantly outside of the metaverse. The internet’s been around for long enough for tech companies to know Bad People will use their products, but very few companies seem willing to try and find solutions to this. BUZZFEED LINK. BBC LINK.
Australia’s health influencer crackdown
The new Therapeutic Goods Advertising Code has banned influencers from advertising TGA registered goods such as skincare and supplements. Except it hasn’t. The distinction here is between endorsements (“I like this product”) and reviews (“I used this product and it improved my life”). The latter aren’t ok. It’s a bit better than the previous code, which seemingly contradicted itself, but also highlights the challenge in policing this area when most influencers probably won’t have read the code or be aware of the nuances in language that could move an endorsement into a review. Other government regulators tend to tell influencers to take down posts that are already several months old, so there’s little incentive to stick to the guidelines currently. Somewhere, there’s a very good business waiting to be created providing regulatory compliance guidance to internet celebrities and internet culture advice to government bodies. LINK.
Thanks for reading this far. Hopefully you’ve found it mildly diverting. Like what you’ve read? Forward it onto somebody and ask them to subscribe.
Playing us out this week: Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Breathless. In case you can’t get enough of Peaky Blinders’ stylised soundtrack. Also recommended as an album: Carnage by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Possibly one of the albums of 2021.