by Real Business - Thursday, 30th August 2007

Questions to ask yourself before briefing an advertising agency

1 What’s the job of the advertising? What do you want people to do once they’ve seen your ad? An increase in desire? Footfall? Brand awareness? Customer information? How will they feel and react? Changed views/perceptions?

Keep it short and remember, unless you are selling “off the page”, ads do not sell products.

2 Who are we talking to? What do potential customers look like? Sex, age, class, race? Are they loyal or do they shop around? How much do you know about their lifestyle and attitudes - beyond just A1/C1 social categories?

Bring your audience to life. Draw a vivid image in your advertising agency’s mind.

3 What tone of voice should we use? Should it be jokey, informative, aggressive, soft sell?

This will have important influences on how your message is communicated.

4 What is the single most motivating and differentiating thing you can say about your product or brand?

This is the important bit.

5 What’s the benefit to customers? The promise?

This can be factual (ie, cheapest, fastest, safest). But look also at the differences between what you think are your benefits - and what your customers think. Find out how your customers differentiate products and how they’re thinking when they buy.

6 Why should the customer believe the proposition’s promise?

Use all the evidence you have to support/demonstrate the proposition. Agencies create ads from nuggets of information. The more nuggets you supply, the better chance of a great ad.

7 What is the desired consumer response? What do you want the prospective customer to know/think/feel/do?

You may say, “obvious, we want them to buy our product.” But think about it: how many ads make you jump into your car and go and buy the product there and then?

8 Essential inclusions? Logo/address/phone number/ map/corporate colours etc.

There’s a whole host of things that you may think you must have in your ad but do you really need the chairman’s picture?

9 Restraints/job parameters?

What can’t or must not be in the ad.

10 Background?

Anything relevant on your company, your marketing strategy and the market.

11 What’s the budget?

How not to work with creatives

The worst brief we’ve ever read (and it’s for real).

“We already have a design, we’re not planning to consult professional designers, because we knew there wasn’t enough money. I can show you some roughs now of the design we’d like to work up. We can give you a pretty good idea of the spec after the weekend. We’ll have first draft of the copy soon. We want to do some digital photos for positional, but we’d need to spend money on film for the real shots. We need the Quark file for the letterhead, so we can take off the bits we need for the grid (what face is the ‘nm’ in?). I can do all the artwork on one of my father’s Macs, and produce some seps which we can get run off as film or bromide at a bureau in Cambridge, where it is bound to be cheaper than London (unless you have a contact who will do it for free) - likewise printing.

“The budget we will need will be for photographic film, bureau film or bromide x 48 (that’s four seps each for FC, IFC, eight pages, IBC, BC), paper, printing, folding, and binding. We will do the delivery and collection and all other work, plus free consultancy from my father and anyone else we need to drag in.”

Why it’s so bad
If you already know what you want, why bother asking a design agency to do it? Why not just pop down to the local copy shop and do it yourself on a photocopier? You already know that they’re sensitive types; so why make it worse for yourself by usurping them?

There’s obviously no pride in this project. Money is the only motivator throughout. Before even talking about the design, it’s cost-cutting, cost-cutting. You may not have much money for a job, but you can still get the creatives excited. Why demotivate them from the start?

Designers and creatives across the spectrum are proud of their technology and their ability to deploy it. Pander to them a bit. Get them interested. Give them work that will stretch their skills. They’re not always motivated by money, but by trying new ideas, experimenting with new technologies. Play up to that.

Our conclusions? Aside from being mean, reluctant and half-baked, what this brief lacks most of all is detail. You wouldn’t expect a consultant to work for you without any background to you and your business, how the project came about, who the customers are, what they do, what they enjoy, where they live... Creative people may not be steeped in the business issues, but they thrive on nuggets of information. Give them something to work with.

Contacts
Phil Fraser is advertising account director at The Brahm Agency. Contact him at p.fraser@brahm.com

Tags: bureau film, design wed, potential customers, advertising agency1 whats, customers differentiate products, ads make, design agency, great ad, photographic film, spend money, important bit whats, ad 10 background, advertising account director, advertising agencys mind, cost cutting, customer information, sell products, nuggets, address phone number, corporate colours, vivid image, prospective customer, social categories, sex age, consumer response, jokey, brand awareness, inclusions, advertising agency, tone of voice, better chance, perceptions, c1, a1, attitudes,