Briefing an agency so you get what you asked for

Rework is almost always caused by the brief, not by the agency. Three lines are usually missing: what the work is for, who decides, and what would make it wrong. Supply those and most of the arguing disappears, because the disagreements happen at the start, where they're cheap, rather than at the end, where they're expensive and personal.

Our interest, stated first. We're on the other side of this, because we take briefs from in-house teams. A piece telling you how to brief us better isn't a neutral piece, so judge it on whether the advice would also make it harder for a supplier to pad a job. It should.

Brief the result, not the deliverable

The commonest fault is briefing a thing instead of an outcome. "We need a landing page" is a thing. "We need the people arriving from this campaign to book a demo, and at the moment they land on the homepage and leave" is an outcome, and it lets a good supplier tell you the page isn't the answer.

Brief the outcome and you buy judgement. Brief the deliverable and you buy production, which is cheaper by the hour and more expensive by the year.

What a brief must contain

There are nine lines, and if the brief runs past two pages, it has stopped being a brief.

1. What this is for. The outcome, in one sentence, in business terms.
2. Who it's for. I don't mean a persona document. I mean the actual people: what they already know, what they're worried about, and what they'd compare you against.
3. What success looks like, and how it will be measured. If you can't say, say that, and agree it before the work starts rather than after.
4. What already exists. Describe previous attempts, what happened, and why you think they didn't work. Suppliers repeat your mistakes when you hide them.
5. What's fixed and what's open. List the brand rules, the legal wording and the platforms you're stuck with. Be explicit, because a supplier can't tell the difference between a preference and a constraint.
6. What would make this wrong. It's the single most useful line in any brief, and it can be as plain as "Anything that needs the sales team to change what they do." or "Anything that takes more than a day a month to keep going."
7. Who decides. Write one name here, not a committee and not "the team".
8. The deadline, and what's driving it. A real date with a reason attached gets respected. An invented one gets tested.
9. The budget, or the range. Withholding it doesn't get you a better price. It gets you a proposal aimed at the wrong size of answer.

The three lines people leave out

Who decides. If the brief doesn't say, the decision gets made by whoever is loudest in the review, and often by somebody who wasn't at the kick-off. That's where "can we see another version" comes from.

What would make it wrong. Suppliers can hit a target they can see. Without this line, they aim for what they think you'll like, which is a guess about your taste rather than about your business.

What already failed. It feels like an admission, but it's the cheapest thing you can give anybody.

What to leave out

• Solutions, when you mean problems. If you've already decided the answer, say that it's decided and why, so nobody wastes time proposing a better one you can't use.
• Internal politics, disguised. "The managing director doesn't like blue" is a constraint. Write it as one rather than dressing it up as a brand principle.
• Everything you know about the audience. A brief isn't a research dump. Attach the research, and keep the brief short enough to be read.

Hold a kick-off, and take notes yourself

Hold it on a call once they've read the brief and before anyone starts, and keep it to twenty minutes. If you're the only marketer in the building, this is the meeting worth protecting, and running a marketing team of one is the wider version of that problem. Ask them to play the brief back to you in their own words. If what comes back isn't what you meant, you've found the misunderstanding on day one, for the price of twenty minutes.

Write down what was agreed and send it the same day. Whoever writes the notes sets the record, and if you're the client, it should be you.

Agree how feedback works, before there is any

Decide now who collects it, in what form, and by when. One consolidated set of comments from a named person beats four people replying separately to the same email. It also prevents the worst pattern in agency work: contradictory feedback that the supplier has to resolve by guessing which of you matters more.

Say how many rounds are included, too. That belongs at the quote stage, which is why it's one of the questions to ask a marketing agency before you sign.

Learn from every brief

When the work is done, write two sentences: what you got, and what you'd change about the brief next time. A folder of old briefs with those notes attached will improve your team's work faster than any training.

Once the work is under way, the job changes from briefing to managing, and the trick there is managing an agency without doing their job. And if you'd like somebody who has sat on both sides to write the brief with you, that's exactly the kind of week our fractional and part-time marketing leadership covers.