A brief landed in my inbox on a Monday with fourteen objectives on it. Fourteen, numbered and bolded, each defensible on its own, and together a polite request to be everything to everyone by the end of Q3.
I printed it and took it to Ovation with a cortado and started crossing things out. When I got down to two objectives, the two that were left contradicted each other. That turned out to be the valuable part. The contradiction had been sitting inside the business for a year. It had just never been on one page before.
The brief had not failed because it was written badly. It failed because nobody made a decision before writing it.
A brief is not a container you pour the strategy into. Writing one honestly is the strategy, and everything after it is execution.
The test I use now is simple and slightly rude. Read the brief and ask what it forbids. A good brief tells the team what not to make, who the work is not for, and which perfectly reasonable idea is off the table this year. If it forbids nothing, it has decided nothing. A brief that permits everything commissions nothing.
This is why the best briefs are short and feel a little dangerous. Oatly's work reads like somebody decided, in advance, to annoy a specific group of people and accepted the cost. Trader Joe's runs no real advertising, which is a decision that only survives if it was written down somewhere and defended. Patagonia knows exactly which customer it is willing to lose. None of that comes out of a workshop. It comes out of a page that says no.
I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, and the failure mode is always the same. The brief gets circulated for input. Every stakeholder adds the one thing they cannot go without, nobody removes anything, and by Friday the document has fourteen objectives and zero opinions. Then we blame the creative team for work that feels generic. The work was generic on arrival. It was briefed that way.
If you want a better brief, do the arguing before you write, not after. Get the two people who disagree in a room and make them settle it in one sentence. Painful, unbillable, and the only part of the process that actually determines the outcome.
A brief that permits everything commissions nothing.
The fourteen objective brief went back with two sentences on it. The client read it and asked, that's it. Yes. That is what a year of internal disagreement looks like once it finally agrees with itself, and it fits on a Post-it. The rest of the year is just doing the thing. Which, compared to writing those two sentences, is the easy part.