Adland bosses from the media owner, agency and client side have agreed this week that the industry is suffering the effects of “terrible” briefs, leading to low quality work, frustration and wasted time.
“That’s one of the fundamental pain points for a lot of media owners – the lazy brief,” said Andrew Mortimer, director of client strategy at Sky, during Advertising Week Europe this week.
Asked whether media owners can do more to help support agencies in writing media briefs, Mortimer revealed that Sky has an ex-agency team member “rewrite” the brief, to make sure the objectives are clear.
Badly written briefs lead to a “first past the post” mentality among the media owners who respond, Mortimer said, which leads to a high volume of low quality work.
[advert position=”left”]
From the agency perspective, PHD’s chief strategy officer, Mike Florence, agreed that briefs are currently “terrible”.
“The best work we do is without a brief, where we understand our clients so well [that] we proactively come up with a solution based on their needs,” he said.
Florence added that whilst client briefs remain essential, “they’re often awful, or cut and paste from the year before.”
However, the problem “leads back to partnerships” between media owners, media agencies and clients, he said. “When you have a true partnership in place, you actually give them a heads up about what’s coming down the line and the brief comes at the end.”
“So if you’re getting bad briefs from an agency, it’s because you haven’t got a decent partnership with them.”
Jan Gooding, former group brand director of Aviva, also expressed concern over the quality of rushed client briefs in her column for Mediatel this week.
“I worry that intellectual rigour, and the time needed to think, has become unfashionable,” she said.
