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(Bananas), Brainstorming and Briefs By Shamini Nair, DDB Springboard Hong Kong -- the APG Creative Briefing Course, Hong Kong, December 2001 Bill Bernbach once said that it wasn't how short you made it, it was how it was made short that mattered. The debut of the APG Creative Briefing Course in Hong Kong last December was an attempt to apply some method to the madness of writing a creative brief. Tasked unenviably with applying some science to the art, Merry Baskin led us through the process with a two-day course attended by around 16 people largely from planning or account servicing competencies. So you may ask, why the need for this session? If we begin by looking at the facts about the brief, yes, it is a "contract" between parties - so we use it to argue our cases with clients, with creatives, with account service. Yes, it's the baton in the advertising development relay - so we use it to distills our months of planning, misguided leads and research, sweat, blood and tears into one or two simple pages. But what it really comes down to is a motive far less altruistic than that. Let's face it, the simple reason why we need to write better briefs (all the time) is because it serves our role in the agency as much as it serves a role for the creatives. A planner lacking good brief writing or briefing skills remains crippled from realizing the full potential of their work. With all this accountability on one simple sheet of paper on one hand, and someone coming along and volunteering a recipe for better briefs on the other-are you going to say no? For me, the highlight of day one (with the exception of the banana brief) was the "cheat sheet" Merry shared with us on sources of inspiration for the single-minded proposition. Whilst most other sections of a brief warrant an element of sophistication that elicits an evocative response, this seems more a matter of applying thought to the syntax rather than talent. The magic of the brief however, never comes through more clearly than through the proposition - and discovering it is more often than not, the search for the proverbial needle. Whilst no amounts of training will ensure a 100% hit rate, there are simply too many variables in the equation for that - investigating the areas that were suggested, such as product heritage, price characteristics, etc could at least give you the confidence that your net was large enough to ensnare the elusive ingredient almost all of the time. Day two saw the focus shift to the potential of briefing sessions away from the more taciturn creative brief. In an agency like mine, where autonomy is given to the format a brief takes, the briefing session represents the evolved creative brief, it is almost like the "New Economy" brief - more open, interactive, less hierarchical, an "ideas-incubator", if you pardon the analogy. Back at the training course, it was crunch time. Working in teams we hadn't worked in before, under unrealistic deadline conditions (although I dare say some here in Hong Kong would argue otherwise) we were expected to uncover a brief from start to finish. Later that day we would be ushered in to meet our creative destiny in the form of two volunteer creative staff who would cast our fate as exceptional or routine agents of creativity. Sparing excessive detail, let's just say that a large number of us faced some grave self-questioning that afternoon. The diversity of approach we witnessed from different teams was lesson again that in our industry there is no black and white. The successful teams were announced, the prizes were handed out, celebrity was achieved and photoflashes momentarily blinded us all. When all of us had finished, Merry approached the teams with a "here's one I prepared earlier" version - or in this case, the documented case study of the original brief and the creative outcomes for our review. The techniques taught in the course travel well from Europe to Asia with two differences its application in this region. "Asian" planners need to be multi-dimensional enough to render the insights we develop for international brands true to the values we hold traditionally within the complex cultures we operate in, without losing the global stake the brand holds. Secondly, that both propositions and insights if developed in English, translate well if at all into the local languages, bowing to the language rather than challenging it. What courses like these do is construct a means of increasing the likelihood that we retrieve propositions that spark extraordinary excitement in the creative spaces of our agencies. By repeatedly pledging our efforts into pursuing a more thorough way of getting the most out of our briefs and briefings, we as planners make a promise that we are continually searching for extraordinary things in extraordinary ways. And we'll probably find them, too. (c) Account Planning Group 1995-2002
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