As a brand manager or director, you know this feeling — grinding away on a creative brief, only to pass an uninspired document over to an agency, and wondering why the resulting ideas fell flat.

Here’s a secret: we need to step up our creative brief game if we want to inspire our agencies to deliver us more game-changing ideas. 

Nailing the brief is crucial for a successful brand campaign. Brand managers, if your creative brief looks like, "We want people to know our product is the best on the market," you're setting them up to disappoint you. Of course, their concepts will feel uninspired or generic, and they won’t line up with your expectations.

Grace Whitman, senior marketing director at P&G, shares her advice for writing effective briefs that get to the root of what problems a brand is trying to solve.

The key is reframing your projects in more thought-provoking ways that inspire wild, fresh thinking right from the start. For example, that previous example could be reframed as: "Get people to pick up our product and feel the difference in quality compared to our competitors."

See how that prompts more creative exploration? It moves both you and the agency away from generic scripts toward bolder ideas that inspire consumers to take action and interact with your product.

Of course, getting briefs to that insightful level requires more work upfront. You have to provide important context, understand unmet consumer needs, and consider what intriguing background details normally get left out. Grace emphasizes putting yourself in the agency's shoes. Ask yourself: What context and background would be helpful to provide? How could I frame the request in an insightful, unexpected way? 

That means digging in and considering the most compelling ways to frame your objectives, sharing the history of your brand, or highlighting past marketing campaigns that knocked it out of the park. Before engaging agency partners, be thoughtful about arming them with enough perspective to fully inspire innovative concepts.

It may mean realizing part-way through writing it that the initial brief was too narrow, or that you have ideas that could be a brief within a brief. Once you get started, don't get too precious with those first drafts to allow for fresh ideas and additional background context to emerge.

Grace explains that brands shouldn’t be afraid to spend 5 or 6 months getting a brief right. Grace mentions that she and her team have spent over four months crafting a single brief. As they learned more about a brand, the brief changed (as it should). She advocates embracing the iterative process of clarifying the brief overtime to make sure it truly captures the brand and the problem they’re trying to solve.

As she puts it, "It is more important that you spend five months getting a brief right than spending one month getting a brief right and then spending 18 months having to adjust it back and forth with your agency."

That upfront investment minimizes endless cycles of revisions, confusion, and unwasted costs down the line. It's a small hurdle for a smoother, more successful journey.

So don't settle for predictable briefs that will lead to underwhelming creative work. Take the time to craft compelling asks and provide rich context that primes both you and your agency for truly breakthrough solutions. It's more effort upfront, but the payoff is brilliant creative that can transform your business.

To brands like megabrands Secret, a successful campaign means breaking barriers, challenging the status quo, and getting your customers engaged and excited about your brand. So if you’re ready to step up your creative brief game, don’t miss the full interview with Grace Whitman on the Question Everything podcast.