I have sat on both sides of the briefing table. As Marketing Director at Unilever I wrote the briefs, for brands like Dove, Sunsilk and Vaseline. For the last 15 years at FORWARD I have been on the receiving end of hundreds of them. The best briefs have a quality you can feel the moment you read them. They make the room lean forward.
The numbers say most briefs miss. The Better Briefs Project surveyed over 1,700 marketers and agency professionals. 78% of marketers believe their briefs give clear strategic direction. Only 5% of agencies agree. That gap wastes an estimated one-third of marketing budgets.
This is not a list of what to put in a brief (the downloadable template at the end covers that). These are the twelve principles that separate briefs that inspire great work from the ones that produce competent, forgettable work, with real campaigns to show the difference.
A product PR brief and a brand PR brief are different jobs. Decide which one you are asking for before you write a word.
The product is almost never the story. Give the agency a brand truth and an audience insight, then trust them to build the bridge between the two.
Fancy Feast's idea was "love is in the details." A press release about premium cat food would have gone nowhere, so we built the world's first Fancy Feast Cat Hotel at The Langham: a luxury Valentine's staycation for cats and their owners. The result: 39 media clips, 29 million opportunities to see, and 24% social follower growth. The product was nowhere in the headline. The brand was everywhere.
If you are not excited by your own brief, your agency will not be either. How you deliver it matters as much as what is in it.
Nescafe once briefed us at a coffee roaster: a morning smelling, tasting and watching beans roast. We left inspired, not just informed, and that immersion shaped the campaign. Budweiser briefed an agency on the back of a beer coaster in a Manhattan speakeasy. The brief was tiny. The experience was unforgettable.
You do not need a speakeasy. Brief at the place your product is made, or where your customers use it, and the agency feels part of the brand rather than outside it.
You do not pay for the placement, but the campaigns that earn coverage need investment in talent, content and amplification. Be honest in the brief about what is available.
For Vaseline, when "slugging" went viral on TikTok, Unilever ran its largest-ever influencer campaign in the portfolio: 34 creators, paid amplification, the lot. The result: 50.2 million paid impressions, a 7.2% engagement rate, and 58.8% year-on-year sales growth (172% at Chemist Warehouse). It worked because the investment matched the ambition.
Beyond talent and content, budget for amplification:
Set the mandatories and be clear on what claims can and cannot be made. Then take off the creative handcuffs.
Uncle Tobys was repositioning as the "Natural Energy Company." Rather than copy the advertising, we built the world's first Energy Exchange Cafe, where people swapped the steps they had walked for oat-fuelled dishes. Over three days, 2,500 people exchanged 13 million steps, generating 50 media stories and 12 million OTS, and a PRIA Golden Target Award. The best PR ideas are cousins of the advertising, not identical twins.
The most common mistake in briefs is trying to say too much. "And another thing" gets added until the brief says nothing. Distil it to one proposition: if you cannot, it is not ready to send.
Then treat the brief as the start of a conversation, not the final word. A good agency will challenge assumptions and spot gaps you are too close to see. The brief sharpens through that process. If your agency accepts every brief without question, worry more than if they push back.
Some brands tell the same story every year. The job is making it feel new when nothing has changed.
For Dry July we introduced Dry(ish) July (go dry for 31, 21 or 14 days) and backed it with research showing three in five Australians were sober-curious. That data wrote the headlines: 505 media clips, 138 million OTS, and 37,000 participants raising $10.7 million. Commissioned research gives journalists a reason to cover a familiar story, as long as it supports a real insight rather than masking the lack of one.
Journalists reject marketing speak on sight, consumers can smell it, and AI platforms increasingly weigh source credibility when deciding what to cite. Independent voices carry authority a brand spokesperson cannot.
For Dove's 20th anniversary of the Campaign for Real Beauty, we brought in body-image experts and commissioned a 33,000-person global study. The striking stat, that 44% of Australian women would sacrifice a year of their life for beauty ideals, is what journalists led with, not the anniversary. Identify the experts who can speak to your territory, and budget for them.
The best ideas spark a flame and create a wildfire. They do not play it safe. Your brief sets the courage level.
If you want safe, say so. If you want famous, say that instead. Fame and safety rarely coexist.
Most brands work with several agencies. The best campaigns happen when they are briefed together and build on each other's work, not stitched together at the end.
Integrated campaigns can deliver up to 30% higher ROI than siloed ones, and earned media lifts paid click-through rates by around 22%.
Great campaigns take months to ideate, refine and execute. An impossible timeline gets you the fastest thinking, not the best.
Venues, talent, content, amplification and research all need lead time, and earned media needs even more. Brands that start planning four months out see a 45% higher success rate in securing placements than those that start two months before. If the timeline is genuinely tight, say so in the brief so the agency can prioritise.
Every brand wants what Dove has. Few will do what Dove did to get it. The Campaign for Real Beauty launched in 2004 and has returned to the same core truth for two decades, finding fresh expressions as the enemy moved from Photoshop to filters to AI. Dove grew from roughly $2.5 billion to $6 billion in brand revenue, and Ad Age named it the number one campaign of the century.
Do not brief for one campaign. Brief for the next chapter in a story your brand has been telling.
A great brief does not describe what you want the agency to say. It describes the problem you need them to solve. It inspires, informs, sets the mandatories, and trusts the agency to find the answer. Get it right and the returns compound for years.
The template below reflects everything above. It will not write your brief for you, but it will make sure you are asking the right questions before you hit send.
Free Word template. Enter your details and it is yours.
One to two pages for the core brief. If you cannot articulate the problem, the audience and the ambition in two pages, it is not ready. Keep background, brand guidelines and market data in appendices.
Share it as context, not a constraint. The PR agency needs to understand the advertising direction, but letting them develop an earned-first idea in the same territory almost always produces stronger work than asking them to replicate the ad.
The agency fee is only part of it. Budget separately for talent, content production, paid amplification (boosting, Linkby) and activation costs such as venues and events. A common mistake is funding the agency but not the tools they need to deliver.
As early as possible, briefed alongside creative and media rather than after the advertising is locked. Earned-first thinking can shape the whole campaign. If PR is an afterthought, the work will feel like one.
Ask three questions. Does the idea make you feel something? Can you picture a journalist writing about it? Does it connect to your brand without feeling like a product ad?
Three to four months for a campaign with earned media, talent and content. Six months or more if experiential activations, long-lead media or commissioned research are involved.
