Our Creative Briefing Seminar.

Our planning department recently took over a small conference room, deep in the cellars of a fine London establishment, for an entire morning of workshop fun. The aim of the session was to teach the audience not only how to write, but also procure, assess and deliver the perfect creative brief.

This session was created specifically for the not-for-profit sector, and thanks to our preliminary survey, we knew each of the 19 attendees were looking to get something slightly different from the session. This allowed (and obliged) us to cover an awful lot over a relatively short period. Cue four hours of exercises, discussions, best practice pointers, coffees, teas and texts - we even had a few healthy disagreements to go with the rather unhealthy pastries.

Over the morning, we tackled important questions such as why a creative brief is so important, what different types there are and when each should be used. We also looked at the different sections of a brief and which tend to be unanimous across different templates - even if the way they're expressed isn't.

With this in mind, we tried to shed some light on what we should include about our target audience in order to deliver a perfect brief, and also tackle that tricky question; what really is an insight? We ventured into the turbulent waters of the 'single minded proposition', but hopefully, came out with a good understanding of both its purpose and challenges.

Had we had more time we would've spent longer discussing why the briefing is just as important as the actual brief. We don't just slip it under the creative's door and leg it, rather we should take the opportunity to involve them in the story. We should inspire them to create, not tell them to perform.

Somehow we managed to cover everything else and even had time for a couple of questions. The lovely group of attendees made the workshop a real pleasure to run and their generous input and interaction was insightful, interesting and invaluable to the success of the morning. Initial feedback after the event showed it was well worth the effort (with lots of happy customers).

We can't wait for the next one.

Dom Roe