A creative brief is a short, concise, and detailed summary of a company’s background and goals that they set to achieve before a campaign is launched. Creative briefs are not only limited to marketing campaigns. They can be for any creative project but it’s important that outlines the strategy of the creative project and effectively communicates the overall purpose, objectives, goals, demographics, messaging, and other information that’s essential to the campaign.
I chose to analyze a creative brief for 5-hour energy, an energy shot drink company that aims to provide an alternative to coffee and other energy products. From a design standpoint, this creative brief is very word-dominated and makes it tiresome for the viewer to read through. It looks like a page taken straight out of a textbook.
Key Fact & Consumer Problem: This section briefly describes the product that 5-hour Energy is offering. It’s very short and concise however I disagree with how they titled this section. They also identify the problem that the consumer is facing and how the product will solve that problem. Both of these sections could have been summed up in a company overview.
Advertising Objective: This section clearly identifies the advertising goal that the campaign is set out to achieve. It shows us who the target audience is, the campaign timeline, and metrics that they’re using to determine success.
Product usage: This part of the creative brief confuses me a bit. I think what they’re trying to communicate is how they intend to market the usage of the product.
Demographics: This section describes the key aspects of the target demographic their seeking to meet such as: their sex, age, marital status, geographic location, income, and age of children.
Psychographics: This section way too much text to describe the target audience. I understand that they want to appeal to both men and women, but the way that they switch between describing the psychographics of the two is confusing and tiresome. It could have been split into two parts so that it’s easier to understand visually or combine the descriptions in ways that make it more concise.
Key Consumer Insight: The key insight was really short and honestly didn’t really reveal much that the reader couldn’t already infer. They could have expanded more on this section since this is one of the major aspects of the campaign.
The rest of the sections were concise and to the point.
This brief, in my opinion, was poorly executed and needs a lot of work. If they combined the demographics and psychographics and broke it up between men and women, I think it would have made the information easier to understand and process visually. Furthermore this brief lacks interesting visual elements, charts, graphs, pictures, etc. This negatively impacts creativity because it’s more difficult to be inspired by simple bodies of text. Lastly, they did not include the media channels of which the messaging would be carried out through.
Sources:
https://www.workfront.com/project-management/life-cycle/initiation/creative-brief
https://insights.newscred.com/how-to-write-a-creative-brief-with-examples/
Image source:
https://www.leadquizzes.com/blog/brief-but-effective-what-makes-a-great-creative-brief-13-samples/
Malvin Malai Harrison 
Leave a comment