GuideHow marketing gets bought
Agency brief
Definition
The document that tells an agency what the work must achieve, and the single biggest determinant of what comes back. In my experience, weak agency output is more often a briefing failure than a talent failure.
How you recognize it
A brief that works answers five questions on a page: which business objective the work serves and which number it should move, who the work is for, what has been tried before and what happened, which constraints it must respect, and who approves it. One name, with authority to say yes. The counterfeit is the task list. “Four ads and two emails by March” specifies the output and leaves the objective blank, so the agency fills the blank with its own assumptions and you receive execution nobody can judge: the deliverables exist, the deadline was met, and whether it worked has no answer, because success was never defined.
What to watch for
The brief names deliverables and a deadline and no number the work should move, so when the work lands the only available review is whether you like it. Several people can comment and nobody can approve, and rounds of amends stand in for a decision. The section on what has been tried is blank while the agency proposes something you have already run, which means you are paying to rediscover your own results. Or the agency wrote the brief itself after kick-off, and the document that should direct the work instead records what they intended to do anyway.
The question you ask
“Can I see the brief this work came from?”