I have a new hero. His name is Frank and he had the best idea I’ve heard in years. Last Thursday morning I had the great privilege to speak at BtoB Magazine’s NetMarketing Breakfast in Boston. Frank Days from Novell was speaking and his topic, way more interesting than mine, was on the notion of applying Agile methodologies to marketing. If you haven’t met Agile yet, it has its roots in software development going back to 2001. Click here for the full story.
The manifesto for agile software development is simple, powerful and enormously effective. Here it is:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaborationover contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.
Many organizations, including several I have worked for, have seen good results with this approach, which has since spread to other professionals including, project managers, who use it to spend less time shepherding people who are up their own bums and more time pushing things forward.
Back to Frank. He’s spent a great deal of time thinking about and applying Agile practices to his marketing and has developed a wonderful seven-step approach which I like because it involves shorter meetings and lots of Post-it Notes. His agile marketing blog also features a terrific collection of articles by Agile experts and practitioners.
But none of this isn’t why Frank is my hero; Frank is my hero because he said “creative briefs are crap”. Just like that. Out loud in front of a room full of people Frank said what we all secretly know to be true. Creative briefs (and marketing briefs and product launch briefs and the rest of them) are massive works of mostly fiction assembled by committees, read by nobody and loathed by everyone involved.
A quick search reveals that agencies hate them too. Creative people complain they can’t find the information or insight they need. Account managers say marketers are just filling in a form and not really briefing them. Marketers dread the hours and hours it takes just to assemble the information and the many hours more to get it past the Corporate Overlords and Hand-Wringers before wasting a day presenting it to the agency so they can rewrite it and resent the marketers even more.
Jasmin Cheng from Twist Image, a Montreal agency that is now Mirum, did a research project on creative briefs which is engagingly presented in this SlideShare presentation. It’s an earnest and well-meaning attempt to figure out why clients hate writing the briefs, account teams hate discussing them with creative teams and creative teams hate the information they get (or don’t) from the brief. Observations from her deck (she interviewed mostly agency folks) include:
- Most briefs are too long and unfocused to be useful
- A brief is not a form to be filled out
- There is a need to revisit the current creative brief template
- People aren’t trained on the same level about how to write and read a brief
- Account teams don’t know what creative teams want
- Clients expect creatives to solve business problems, not creative problems
- Briefings should move out of boardrooms and into more interactive forums like art galleries or using the product.
The last point is the most interesting of the lot, in my opinion, because unlike the rest it doesn’t assume that work must begin and end with some template that is filled in. The problem, in their minds, is that if people were just better at it, briefs would be useful. But nobody is questioning the need for the brief in the first place. Except for Frank Days and now me too.
What would happen if we didn’t write a brief? What if we just sat down in a PowerPoint-free zone and discussed what we wanted to do and by when. What if we just had a series of conversations, subsequent lists of actions to take and uninterrupted stretches of time to go do the work?
I’m pretty sure nothing bad would happen. I think it’s time we dumped the brief. The question is, do we go cold turkey or do we wean ourselves off them one disappointing campaign at a time? Maybe there’s a patch or some gum we can try instead? If you have managed to kick the habit, I’d love to hear from you.
Related Posts
Preventing Agency Suckiness
Resentful Client, Cringing Agency
BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
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Frank Days says
Liz,
Thanks for the kid words. It has been a long time since I was someone’s hero (except for my with my son).
I am glad you connected with my points. For some reason most marketers I know are content with the status quo and traditional waterfall approaches to marketing.
There are many things to be figured out with the agile methodology in marketing but it is nice to see people including IDC joining the conversation.
Thanks and stay agile my friend
Frank
Sharon says
Personally I think I write very good creative briefs 🙂
They are usually less than two pages long and to the point.
I have to agree, the creative briefs that you are referring to should definitely be dumped!!!