What is a brief?
A media brief is a resource or document that provides the guiding parameters for, and outlines the expectations of, a media campaign.
Why is a brief important?
Sun Tzu said in the Art of War, ‘every battle is won before it is fought’ to emphasise the importance of planning ahead. This captures the importance of preparing a solid brief. A lot of thought and research must go into preparing the brief so that your media strategy can deliver on the brief and overall business objective effectively.
What goes into a brief?
There are 7 key components that every brief requires. Before I reveal these, I need to emphasise the importance of having a thorough thought process in the lead up to fulfilling these key components.
As such, I have put together a flow of questions you can use when preparing or tackling a brief:
What is the business problem? (e.g. revenue is not growing)
What is the reason for this? (e.g. revenue is only generated by a few loyal customers)
What do we need to do to solve this problem? (e.g. acquire new customers)
How will this solve the business problem? (e.g. new customers will generate fresh revenue which will subsequently grow overall revenue)
Why is this not happening already? (e.g. not many people know about the brand)
What do we need to do to overcome this? (e.g. get more people to know about the brand)
What do we want media to do to help with this? (e.g. raise brand awareness and generate curiosity of the brand and its products)
Who do we want our advertisements to talk to? (e.g. fitness enthusiasts)
How will we measure the success of media? (e.g. reach X number of fitness enthusiasts, surveys on brand recall, website traffic etc.)
How will we measure success for the business? (e.g. acquired X number of new customers, revenue increased by XX%)
What are we willing to spend to make this happen? (e.g. based on past data, we can spend $20,000 to achieve a positive Return on Ad Spend ‘ROAS’)
When do we want all of this to happen? (e.g. 1st Jan - 14th Feb based on seasonality, the start of the year is the best time to reach our key audience as many people build new year’s resolutions around fitness and maintain momentum in the lead up to valentine’s day)
By answering these questions we can identify the 7 key components of a brief:
Business Objective - Intended business outcomes in relation to brand growth and profitability
Business Context - The observation and insights that fueled this campaign
Media Objective - What media needs to do to help achieve the business objective
Media KPIs - What media needs to achieve for this campaign to be considered successful
Audience - Who this advertising/media campaign is relevant to
Budget - How much we will spend on our media campaign
Timing - When exactly the campaign will run
All seven of these components are necessary to plan and run a media campaign that will result in a direct impact on the business.
Additional notes:
In a client-agency relationship, it is common for clients and media agencies to work together to prepare a complete brief. Clients usually provide key information such as budget, objective, key audiences and timing. Media agencies offer media specific information such as target audiences and KPIs.
While our focus here is on media briefs, it is important to consider the creative angle or strategy as this would work in tandem with the media strategy.
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