No more pencils, no more books

I spent the weekend back in school, teaching the "creative briefs" segment of the Account Planning course at Miami Ad School Minneapolis. Here are some of the students:

They're much less blurry in real life.

The class was great. They were all really smart and eager and interested and full of questions and ideas. And it was a fun experience.

I'm not actually sure how useful I was, because I was trying to be honest that there isn't really a proper planning process. Any appearance thereof on agency websites and case studies is a bit of a fiction. We pretend that it's neat and tidy, but it isn't. In my experience the best stuff comes from happy accidents and random connections and odd last minute inspirations. I guess the closest we can come to a process is to be open to things when they do happen and seeing where everything takes you. But I'm not sure that makes for great lecture material.

That said, here are a few obvious things that I tried to get across:

1. Believe in the potential of every project. Every project has a tension, a challenge, or a mystery in it. The biggest part of your job is to inspire, and if you don't see potential no one else will.
2. Don't do it alone. Good strategies and briefs tend to come through a process of iteration and collaboration and false starts and different perspectives.
   
3. Write the brief last. There are a lot of good questions on a creative brief, and you need to be able to answer them, but filling in boxes has a way of limiting thinking. So don't start with the brief, finish with it. I try to figure out what my story is and what my ideal briefing is, and then go back and fill out the creative brief form. Starting out by trying to fill in boxes on a form is a recipe for disaster.
4. Briefings are more important than briefs. I used to think of the briefing as a way to add to the brief and bring the brief to life. Now I look at the briefing as a way to compensate for the weakness of words to express what's really important.
   
5. A briefing is not a meeting. It's a conversation and a relationship that starts long before the brief is written, and continues long after the work starts.
   

Comments

[Hidden Persuader]

A good creative brief is the one that saves time to the accounts and gains time to the creatives :)

[fredrik sarnblad]

Great, to-the-point post Jason. I'll be posting a response to it on my blog.

I bet that was one of the most useful classes those bright planning students ever attended.

[Owen]

Actually that's about how blury we were on Sunday. Overall, Friday's presentation was the best so far of any we've heard. You fortunately chose not to speak of planning in the lofty terms that some others have done but basically said- 'here's how it's done in the real world.' It was a good wake-up call to those in the class who were starting to believe that planning is the end-all, be-all.