How long should a creative brief be?

One to two pages. Longer briefs are usually avoiding a decision rather than communicating one — the length comes from listing every possibility instead of eliminating some.

Should a brief include references and examples?

Yes, but say why each one is there. A reference with no annotation gets interpreted, and it will be interpreted differently than you meant. 'We like this because of the density of information, not the colour' is worth ten unlabelled screenshots.

Who should write the brief, the client or the agency?

The client writes the first version, the agency rewrites it, and both sign the rewrite. A brief written entirely by the agency risks being a brief for the work they wanted to do anyway.

What is the single most common mistake in a brief?

Not naming the approver. Work dies at the point where a person nobody mentioned sees it for the first time in week five and has opinions.

How to Write a Creative Brief That Gets You Good Work

Updated 12 July 2026·3 min read·чети на български →

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A good creative brief states the business problem, the one thing the work must achieve, who it is for, what is fixed and what is open, who approves it, and the deadline. It is short — one to two pages — and its value comes from the constraints it sets rather than the inspiration it offers.

Most briefs are long, enthusiastic, and useless. They describe the company, list adjectives, attach twenty references and ask for something "clean but bold". The work that comes back is a guess, and the revision rounds that follow are the client and the agency slowly discovering what the brief should have said.

A brief is not an inspiration document. It is a constraint document. Its job is to eliminate wrong answers before anyone spends a week on one.

The nine sections

1. The business problem. Not the deliverable — the problem. "We need a new website" is a deliverable. "Our sales team spends the first fifteen minutes of every call explaining what we do" is a problem, and it might not be solved with a website.

2. What has to be true when this is done. One sentence, ideally with a number in it. If you cannot say what would make this a success, nobody downstream can either, and you will judge the work on whether you like it — which is the most expensive criterion there is.

3. Who it is for. Specifically. One imagined person, their situation, and what they currently believe. See brand strategy for why this is the load-bearing section.

4. The one thing they should take away. One. Briefs that list five key messages produce work that communicates none of them.

5. What is fixed. The logo cannot change. It must work in Bulgarian and English. It has to run on our existing CMS. Legal requires the disclaimer. Every constraint you know about saves a round of revisions; every one you withhold buys one.

6. What is genuinely open. Say it explicitly. Creative teams default to caution, and will treat everything as fixed unless told otherwise. "The tone can be much stranger than what we have now" is permission that changes what you get back.

7. Who decides. Name the person, singular, who can approve. Then name everyone who will have an opinion and say whether their opinion is advisory or binding. This section prevents more disasters than the rest combined.

8. Deadline and what drives it. "End of Q3" and "end of Q3 because the trade show starts on the 14th and we need printed materials" are different constraints. The second one lets people make intelligent trade-offs when something slips.

9. Budget, or the range. Withholding it does not get you a better price. It gets you a proposal scoped for the wrong project, and two weeks of re-scoping. If you genuinely do not know, say what the outcome is worth to you.

What to leave out

Your company history, unless it changes a decision.
Long lists of adjectives. "Modern, clean, premium, approachable, bold" describes almost every company and constrains nothing.
Solutions. If the brief specifies a hero video and a three-column layout, you have not written a brief, you have written a spec — and you have paid for expertise you then prevented from being applied.
Unlabelled references. See the FAQ above.

The fill-in version

Problem: ___

Success looks like: ___ (with a number)

Audience: ___ , who currently believe ___

One takeaway: ___

Fixed: ___

Open: ___

Approver: ___ . Advisory opinions: ___

Deadline: ___ , because ___

Budget range: ___

If that takes more than an hour to fill in, the difficulty is not writing — it is that some of these have not been decided yet. Finding that out now costs an hour. Finding it out in week five costs the project.

One habit worth adopting

Ask the agency to send back a one-paragraph restatement of the brief in their own words before any work starts. It takes them ten minutes and it surfaces every misreading while a misreading is still free.

If their restatement surprises you, the brief was not finished. Better to learn that from a paragraph than from a presentation. And if you are still choosing who to send it to, here is how to run that decision.

Questions people actually ask

How long should a creative brief be?: One to two pages. Longer briefs are usually avoiding a decision rather than communicating one — the length comes from listing every possibility instead of eliminating some.
Should a brief include references and examples?: Yes, but say why each one is there. A reference with no annotation gets interpreted, and it will be interpreted differently than you meant. 'We like this because of the density of information, not the colour' is worth ten unlabelled screenshots.
Who should write the brief, the client or the agency?: The client writes the first version, the agency rewrites it, and both sign the rewrite. A brief written entirely by the agency risks being a brief for the work they wanted to do anyway.
What is the single most common mistake in a brief?: Not naming the approver. Work dies at the point where a person nobody mentioned sees it for the first time in week five and has opinions.