Writing a decent brief for both you and your agency partner is massively important. If done well, your brief should act as a touchstone for you both to create actionable instructions out of… it also ensures everyone is staying on course once the project is off the ground.
Trouble is, people aren’t really taught how to brief. So often important details can get left out and details that are supposedly set in stone change halfway through, leading to timely mistakes and costly errors.
This is definitely the case with video content, in spite of it probably being the most effective way to emotively connect with your audiences and educate them on why you exist.
Often video teams are often briefed at the “end” of planning phase… we’ve certainly felt this pain ourselves, and over the years have often had to rewrite briefs with the client to ensure the proposals we come up with are fit for purpose.
So, to save you time, stress and potentially money for when you’re putting your next video brief together, the below are some common details people leave out that are really important for your partners to understand:
1. Communicate your business challenge
Often brands tell us the communication objective of their video project, but it’s even more important to understand what the underlying business problem is that has led to your decision to create this video.
One time we were asked to create a campaign for a client who needed to raise awareness with a new audience, but when we learnt that they also needed to drive sales once that audience landed on their website, the amount and type of content we delivered was reprioritised vs what we had been asked.
If we hadn’t have dug deep here, perhaps it wouldn’t have been as effective as it was.
2. Write down any relevant audience insights
Any audience insights you have to hand should be shared as part of the brief for the video.
Most briefs explain what the brand wants the audience to “know/feel/do” after watching the video, but it’s just as important to understand their mindset and what their painpoints are BEFORE they watch the video.
Frankly even if you don’t have large pools of research to hand, just informing the agency what these people love and worry about around your brand and the sector you work in is massively important to understand.
3. A deep dive into your budget
No, this isn’t the point where you should say what budget you have, that should be a given.
However, you should also include information on what resource you have internally that could help with savings. This could be anything from team or customers who you could feature in the films, locations you could make available, team members who could support with anything during production or after.
Basically it’s worth putting down as that way the agency partner should be able to work out how to best spend the budget knowing all the tools they have at their disposal.
“TOP TIP: if the budgets allocated don’t match your ambitions, consider how you can look money together between your teams... ultimately if the content produced can help recruit new talent or sales teams use in meetings, they should contribute towards the project.”
4. Use the brief to think about how you can scale the campaign
What else are you doing beyond this video to drive the action you want? Are you creating supporting content for the viewer after they watch the video we are being asked to create? What about a landing page that stores some of that info you can drive traffic to and capture emails from? Is there a social competition being created to drive further engagement?
When we say we create “scalable” video this is how we think and often the client is thinking this way too, so let your agency partner know...it can spark new ideas and sometimes additional content that can be captured on set to support your plans.
5. Explain to your partner what types of internal resource are and aren’t available
Following on from this, explain to your video partner what internal resource can support their work. Do you have in house pr or paid media taken care of? What about social community management? Graphic design? It’s great to know this can be leveraged and if you don’t your video partner should have its own decent network of partners they work with to help plug the gaps.
There are plenty of other elements to building out a brief. And whilst we can share briefing templates to help you with this, we also run complimentary briefing workshops to ensure absolutely nothing is missed out. If you’re interested in having one, just get in touch with josh@mattr.media