Byline Creative Brief Made Easy

Countersign creative brief

I don't think there's any lack of places to go creatively that wouldn't be worth exploring an interest of humanity being better we should never forget this is about making emotional work so that you can still create beauty in this world you know we're not designers of shapes we're designers of ideas what architects and designers do is not go along with rules but make people see things in a totally different way try to create brave and generous people allow yourself to be aware of what's wonderful and then uplifting maybe ultimately what's the brief you have to respond to something that makes you gasp with delight and you know it right away there whoa that's it briefs are not handcuffs or railroad tracks or whatever overused analogies we can use I think there's thoughts starters for me it is it is not a printed piece of paper if we were to get a brief the shorter the better it has changed through all of the creative brief I don't think it's ever been as important as it is now simplicity is everything more concise and the sharper the point of view is as to what is the problem the better the work will be you say what to create a brief I think it's a it's a short form communication tool from a client or you develop with a client to sort of set out the mission it's a clarity of purpose a brief is nothing more than an open statement of ambition for a brand or a client that's all it is and that can be put in any words you care so long as it communicates the passion and conviction of your aim the most important thing about the creative brief would be that has to inspire the people who are given the task of solving the problem it's a great starting point and after that the brief keeps changing you know through the conversations to let it change when brief has to leave a lot of room you have to be given a lot of runway a lot of runway so you can take off the fact that the word is called brief is interesting because briefs can often be very long a big fat document that is the history of the company we've gotten some that have made no sense maybe it's a bad brief it has too many pieces overly detailed least brief of all briefs we've gotten some that had been a little restrictive that you gotta be kidding I can't guarantee you're gonna be we have this phrase amongst our all of us in the business your briefs are showing then the brief was either too prescriptive or the project was the wrong project for the person responding so right off the bat I have to start with the notion without being to flip that I don't believe in briefs I believe in relationships well the difference between a brief and a relationship is a brief can be anonymous and I've tended over in the last you know 15 20 years to really work with people who give you like a like a like a really deep sense of where it is that they want to go what it is that they're dreaming about and that in turn has informed us on the project's probably more than any brief has ever done so the discussions we have early on have to be inspiring have to be about vision have to be not just about the next product but about you know the goals and the aspirations of the whole enterprise you know originally my relationship with Hossein rama and the CEO jawbone and and jawbone in general started with a technology that surprised noise took away the ambient noise but the company had no product it just had a technology it had it had algorithms and so the brief really evolved out of discussions out of the relationships I built with a saying and Alex the co-founders and really sort of was built around this notion of everyday life it wasn't sort of a work tool as much as it was something that kind of liberated your hands to do other things with them while you were in conversation and we really wanted it to be about life style about how I live not about you know how I'm gonna take a technology into my life but rather simply how the technology is going to enable certain things in my life that are important whether it's the jam box whether it's the up we've kind of pioneered them and how do you pioneer something with a brief a brief is supposed to describe a lot of the outcomes and a lot of the intents so if the brief was very short and said we want to change people's lives through sound and music and have sounded music really adapts to their everyday that would be a great brief it's short I don't think that having a brief as an artifact has ever been the point and you know even creating a brief is a creative conversation and engaging a client and that kind of a conversation is fun the relationship with the client is can be pretty exciting especially if you're working on a concert hall you know it's dynamic and now we're working on with Dudamel and Venezuela all of these things changed the texture the color of the thinking the the ideas how it's going to be used and they affect what it's going to look like you know there are many different ways to have a dialog and and the best one is that you understand that somebody trusts you and then if you trust each other you can say well I don't think that's a good idea or that might be a better thing to do well I mean in really practical terms we say no to clients that come to us wanting a campaign you know we say yes to the ones that are really great have exciting problems and opportunities and one long-term relationship when the job of being an ad agency was more about making ads the role of the creative brief was simply to tell you what media you were gonna fill and what kind of message you were gonna put in it we're finally being charged with creating results not just ads the best briefs I've ever worked on have always been the most audacious and seemingly impossible including the Samsung one and their brief was simply stated we want to be a credible number two to the smartphone leader they came with a marketing problem it wasn't like hey we really want to do a campaign to launch this new phone the marketing problem that as it was given to us is we have the best innovation in the marketplace which was true nobody knows about it which is also true and the only way to kind of kind of push against their main competition was to be aggressive about messaging that they had taken the innovation advantage how do you get that message out there and assuming that the first two things were were true which you got a pressure test but it just so happened that they were ever in the GS 2 which is the first phone that we launched was the the best smartphone on the on the market as finally Android had gotten up to speed you know they had the right number of apps the functionality the form factor everything was better bigger screen brighter screen so it's just like ok that's a great marketing problem you have a better product and no one knows it if it comes to us that clean which is really rare it's very exciting creative brief but who knew you know in a year and at least in public in brand terms they were number one and now they're number one in sales audacious breeze baby make happen if you're saying this is the goal you can measure success by a number of metrics but we try and encourage it also to be a statement of you know maybe what the dream is like a really deep sense of where it is that they want to go what it is that they're dreaming about I've put the duality in the brief which is a deadline and then and a dream I've got a really nice situation that I can have a fluid brain and go from an assignment which if it intrigues me and I think it's gonna be wonderful to do hurrah and then or I come up with stuff and that's more mulling and wandering around and and letting the process of just being alive inform what I'm gonna do there's a kind of an opening of possibilities when you're working for children and you really have to ask yourself what's important because you usually get only 32 pages to do a children's book and so you better you better really know what you need to say in 32 pages which is not that much the second book that I did I wrote and I painted it was called hey Willy see the pyramids and those were very short stories about my family and friends and I found the essential need I was able to go off on tangents and tell these strange stories and do the paintings and create the entire world and design the copyright page so it didn't look like a copyright page the nice thing about the brief in my world is that it's both extremely pragmatic and concrete there is a product you will make a book or an illustration for a magazine and then the brief is fantastically elusive and completely romantic which is what if what of yourself are you going to put into this work that will make it something that anybody wants to look at you got to trust yourself you got to look at your signature and realize for better for worse that's you and that you bring a persona to the table use the projects you're given is a way to start to define how you think how you differentiate yourself what it is you're gonna bring to each project there's a kind of I think more typical idea of what the brief is which is a communication that at its best is a kind of provocation for instance the cosmopolitan which was a project in Las Vegas we were brought on board actually the slabs were up and the developer went bankrupt a new developer took over and we were brought in and our brief was helped us create a resort that will be substantially more urban than anything that exists in Las Vegas will be more contemporary and might in fact relate to the way the world changes so quickly in a way Las Vegas doesn't and that was I think a very interesting brief for us because it acknowledged that in in and we agreed that the idea of Las Vegas is much better than the reality you know it sort of has this reputation the place it's reinventing itself but there are these very big fixed one-liner monuments there that you either like or you don't like but there's no nothing that happens beyond that so we had the provocation which is let's create a place that is a little bit more changeable and then we had the fixed condition of a relentless series of floor slabs that were already up and then part of the brief acknowledged their big challenge and their big challenge in their mind was how vertical it was so it was I think three thousand rooms on on six acres quite small so the fact that was that vertical in their minds was a limitation because they had to stack public spaces and restaurants were on the third floor and it was it differed from so that tension between what they wanted and what they had built is what allowed us to come back with two big suggestions one was to blow a hole through the podium take about forty thousand square feet out and create an opening through the three bottom floors so that you would experience said vertically so that the floor slabs and the verticality weren't the challenge they became the asset as they were different from anything else and the other challenge was you entered through a sea of columns it's huge I think six foot by six foot 14 foot tall concrete columns eight of them in a lobby and they were there but it allowed us to think about work we had been doing in our technology lab how can we use technology in our projects to bring people together not to have technology as layers that separate people so we started to talk with the lab and realize we could take the surfaces of these columns and treat those as a canvas and then create an open-source platform so that Lobby would always be changing those ideas would not have come about without a brief that had limitations and an invitation we're always looking for new connections and ultimately what we do at the end of the day is make connections nobody else is seen we don't create anything out of thin air and that magic dust is like what's happening in a culture right now I do a tremendous amount of cultural research see see all those gray files on the other side of my office over there there's all my files on research incredibly important that idea of context is more important today than ever before because we have this habit today of thinking that information is not it's not just because you can google it doesn't mean you have context for anything you gotta explore all these these ideas or your irresponsible question how things are made why they're made that way and materials that haven't been used I'm constantly exploring the periphery like that and with things that interest me and the exploration is what leads to that what looks different what we're going through now with Eisenhower thing it's just painful it's a endless yom kippur yeah the original gesture was we had a four and a half acre piece of land in the middle of DC surrounded by three fairly nondescript big buildings that housed departments that Eisenhower started Voice of America education and FAA so how do you corral a site like that to put a memorial in it somebody made a proposal with it like a Greek temple or something you can do it that way but that was the nice you know we've done everything on it in Eisenhower's words so we've gone to great lengths to understand him for who he was and his life and what he stood for and it's really careful I can dot every I and cross every T on every subject about it and prove that we followed that now you may not like it the conclusions but and not everybody's gonna like the same thing but in terms of being responsible - what a memorial for this gentleman would be we have been he was the boy from Abilene he talked about Abilene is the geographic center of America so we came up with these tapestries in metal that are transparent that show Abilene that sets the context in the middle of it we show us nerves the general and as president that's in the brief that's a written brief that we had to do that the idea of the boy looking at his future came from a meeting what the family was there and it's in front of the Department of Education where there are events with schoolchildren on a regular basis right there to have a young boy same size as then sitting on a thing looking at there's something about it that resonates with everybody now the the self-righteous classicists who are fighting us are saying you're portraying him as a hick and he wasn't that and I'm saying you're calling all the people in the Midwest Hicks it's an American when you're an architecture student the brief is God but I've learned about the brief whether it's verbal or written it's our job to challenge it the brief is probably it's irrelevant from the moment that you've read it you know because you know things are already different will literally rewrite a brief like six times in the course of making this stuff I think what makes a great project is a brief and a response that resonate but don't agree oh well you know all the chairs in a mid-range are doing well in Europe have you know foam backs to them and this is exactly when I go okay that means we should not have a phone back right and and what they actually meant is yes it should have a phone back well you know look where we ended right one of the responsibilities of creative people here is to reject the brief if it doesn't feel right if it doesn't feel inspiring you just can't sit there passively and just take it and and not put thought into it so if the grief isn't true then it stopped working on it stop well the brief sparks something probably you know the one that will always talk about the most is the the 1996 Olympics for Nike and we've been stumbling for a while and trying to come up with the work and come up with the brief and so forth but then finally sport is war - the killing so that was the brief and that set the tone now that was backed up by a summer-long of interviews that we've done with the athletes where we knew not just intuitively or instinctively but we knew for a fact how they felt in their hearts about competition and the brief is what gave us the kind of the guideposts in terms of the mood and the kind of work that we created when you say it sport is war - the killing there's a certain tone in there and if you look at the 96 work for Olympics it was pretty controversial wasn't just marketing speak and I wasn't just creative for the sake of being cool or being creative it spoke from the heart of the athlete and so the tone was very aggressive and that brief helped to set that set that tone I think your creative energy always has to come at a problem with the objective of creating the truest thing you always have to be protected by truth you're naked without the truth there is nothing there's nothing left it's cut the marketing and just get to the truth and then we can go from there nine times out of 10 you're in the middle of that conversation and you'll get to a moment of passion or frustration and they'll just be like why can't we just bleh and there it is and then you got that that's all you got to do what we should just do that I'm trying to find a certain elemental truth in work and in living and then something comes out of it that hopefully is essential as an essential feeling hopefully what starts to emerge is something that grows out of the brief but not directly linearly from it and that's what's the DNA of the project what's the engine that's going to drive that project forward emotionally and it's good to get information I like the more information the better don't get me wrong I'm not saying I want to start projects and total ignorance on the country but what I what I want is much more of the soft side I want to understand how it is that people are living with these products I want to understand how it is that these products you know change their lives a little bit the visual cues that we put in a product of course are important but they all add the service of an ideal the one thing that a brief really needs to articulate to me is why are we doing this why are we doing anything at all why are we gonna go into market why we're gonna spend 50 million dollars you know I feel like that's its again it's one of those higher order questions that really helped me get creatively engaged you know when you start telling me what and how through in the form of a brief I'm like you're taking creative tools off the table and giving back you know you don't have to like what we come up with but just at least give us the choice of you know whether we want to use a paintbrush or a jackhammer and if you tell us why we're gonna do this thing it and we got to use everything the creativity thing is trusting your intuition and being curious I grew up with that because my grandfather read me from the Talmud and the Talmud is what is all about why it starts with why and it just keeps lying the hell out you know for endlessly that's creativity it's version comes in different forms you know if it's the right question it'll be enough