How to write a creative brief in 11 steps (with examples and template)

Here at Briefly, we obsess over the marketing brief - the brief that clients share with their agencies.

But the creative brief (the one that agencies write in response to that marketing brief) is an equally important document.

It translates the marketing brief into a format that will inspire ingenious creative thinking. So crafting it deserves time, effort, careful consideration, and no small amount of fun.

What is a creative brief?

A creative brief is a short document - typically 1 to 2 pages - that an agency strategist writes to translate a client's marketing brief into a format that inspires the creative team to produce effective advertising.

The creative brief is usually written by a strategist or account planner at the agency, and it lands on the desks of the creatives who will actually make the work: art directors, copywriters, designers, and occasionally producers. Its job is different from the marketing brief that precedes it. A marketing brief informs - it sets out the business problem, the audience, the budget, and the success metrics. A creative brief inspires - it distils all of that information into a single, provocative proposition that a creative team can respond to with ideas. Where a marketing brief is usually 2 to 4 pages, a creative brief should fit on a single page, or two at a push.

Besides the marketing brief (sometimes called the client brief), it is the most important document in the creative process.

The good news: if you follow these 11 steps, you'll be on track to deliver a great brief.

What is the difference between a creative brief, a marketing brief, and a client brief?

A creative brief is written for a creative team and is designed to direct and inspire the creative work itself. It is usually based on a marketing brief that the client has provided and written by an agency. For smaller projects or if the client is briefing a production agency or freelancer directly, they may write the creative brief themselves. If you're writing this type of brief, you're in the right place.

A client brief is the same as a marketing brief. They're written by clients and outline a new project for their agency. If you're looking to write one of those, head over to our article on 'How to write the perfect marketing brief'.

Creative brief vs marketing brief: what's the difference?

A marketing brief is written by the client to commission a project; a creative brief is written by the agency to inspire the creative team.

The two documents sit at different points in the process, serve different audiences, and do different jobs. Getting the distinction right matters: a creative brief that reads like a marketing brief (too much data, too many objectives, no single-minded proposition) will leave your creatives cold. A marketing brief that reads like a creative brief (all inspiration, no budget, no success metrics) will leave your agency leadership unable to scope or staff the work.

Here's how they compare:

	Marketing brief	Creative brief
Written by	Client (marketing team)	Agency (strategist)
Audience	Agency leadership + account team	Creatives (art directors, copywriters)
Primary purpose	Commission the work	Inspire the work
Typical length	2-4 pages	1-2 pages
Contains a budget?	Yes	Usually no
Contains a single-minded proposition?	Sometimes	Almost always

The line between the two can blur, especially inside in-house creative teams. When a HubSpot content marketer briefs an in-house designer, or when an Oatly brand manager briefs a freelance copywriter, the same person often ends up writing both documents - or collapsing them into a single hybrid brief. That's fine, provided the hybrid still does both jobs: it still sets a budget and success metric, and it still offers a single-minded proposition your creative team can actually build an idea around.

If you're on the client side and you're writing the brief that will commission the project, start with our marketing brief guide. If you're on the agency side (or briefing an in-house team) and you're translating that into something creatives can respond to, you're in the right place.

What should a creative brief include?

Before diving into the step-by-step process, here's a quick overview of the core elements every creative brief should contain:

• Project name - a memorable name that everyone can rally around
• Objectives - what the campaign needs to achieve, framed in human language
• Problem definition - the specific barrier standing in the way of success
• Brand or product truth - the one compelling thing about your product
• Audience insight - a non-obvious truth about the people you're targeting (see our guide to finding marketing insights)
• Category truth - how people think and behave when buying in your category
• Cultural lever - the broader cultural force your campaign can tap into
• Key messages - the 1-3 things your audience needs to remember
• Strategic proposition - your strategy summarised in one sentence
• Considerations and deliverables - the practical details (budget, timeline, formats, mandatories)

Each of these is covered in detail below. If you'd rather start with a template to structure your thinking, grab one of ours first and fill it in as you read.

How to write a creative brief

1. Name your brief and get a template
2. Set the objectives
3. Define the problem
4. Articulate the brand or product truth
5. Capture your audience insight
6. Find a category truth
7. Lean on a cultural lever
8. Craft your key messages
9. Build the strategic proposition
10. Make sure to include the considerations
11. Inspire the creative team

Step 1 - Name your project and get your creative brief template ready 📦

Give your brief an exciting name

This might sound simple, or even silly. But giving your brief a name is an important step.

This is how everyone will refer to this brief over the coming months. And if you don't name it, eventually someone else will. So if you want to avoid the risk that your brief might become known as the "Stinky Horrible No-One-Wants-It Brief," give it an exciting name.

Creative brief template

Templates structure all your thinking and all the information that you need to include in your brief.

If you don't already have a brief template, create your own (if you're brave) or choose one of our free, expertly crafted ones (if you're smart).

Step 2 - Set your objectives 🎯

Usually, the creative brief follows the marketing brief. And the marketing brief usually includes three objectives:

• The business objective
  What the company needs to achieve to improve its bottom line

• The marketing objective
  What you need consumers to do (or not do) that will achieve your business objective

• The communications objective
  What you need consumers to think or feel that will achieve your marketing objective

You need to think carefully about how you frame your objective in your creative brief. It can be tempting to copy-and-paste the communications objective directly. After all, aren't creative teams trained to solve communications problems with creativity?

Yes, they are. But too often, communications objectives aren't framed in a way that most creative teams will be able to effectively respond.

Most of the time, you can get around this by rephrasing the comms objective in more human language.

For example, if the communications objective in the marketing brief looked like this...

Increase perceptions of 'Nike understands the community I live in' amongst Young Londoners by 30% by Q4.

Then the objective you might write in your creative brief could look something like this...

Get young Londoners to see that Nike understands what it means to grow up in London - and makes products that I'd be proud to wear on the streets of London.

In your creative brief, you can often sidestep some of the rigmarole of SMART objectives. These are creative objectives and KPIs that you're setting, and often too much formulaic rigour can hinder, rather than help, the process.

Step 3 - Define the problem 🧠

In a similar vein, you might receive a few problems from the marketing brief: a business, marketing, and communications problem.

And in another similar vein, you need to be considered in your approach to setting your own problem for your creative brief.

Your problem should be a direct response to the objective that you have set. Ask yourself: What stands in the way of achieving that objective?

You might get to something that looks like:

Nike has spent so long putting sports superstars in its campaign that it has lost its ability to appear relevant to young Londoners.

Step 4 - Articulate the brand or product truth ⭐️

The only question you need to answer in your creative brief here is: What is the one unique thing about the brand or the product that will be most compelling to your audience?

Sounds simple, right?

Afraid not.

This is where many arguments start between marketers and agencies (and their creative teams). Creatives often want to subdue the presence of overtly 'advertising-y' messages, and that often includes calling out product truths. Meanwhile, marketers are often focused on how every piece of advertising is driving sales of their product or service. And these two forces can clash.

So, as you're writing this section of your brief, it's important to think of how this brand or product truth can fuel a creative team's ideas, rather than shackle them.

Product truth example: Flora Plant Butter

In this ad for their new plant-based butter, Flora and their agency Pablo used a product truth to create some simply brilliant OOH advertising (alongside an equally brilliant campaign). The truth that plant-based butter and dairy butter both have their origins in the same material, with some different processing in the middle, became the centre of the campaign idea.

Product messaging doesn't need to be stale and boring. Creative thinking around your product truth can lead to insightful, funny, and memorable creative work.

Step 5 - Find your audience insight 💎

Hopefully, there should be a clear target audience in the marketing brief you have received - if not, press your client for one. Or if you're a marketer writing the creative brief, spend some time thinking about who you want to target with this campaign - and read our guide on finding your target audience to help get you moving.

In a creative brief, you need to go a step further than just finding the right audience. You need to craft an insight for this audience - a key fact, piece of information, or description of them that not only makes it clear who this campaign is aimed at, but unlocks a way of talking to them. If you need help with this, check out our guide to finding marketing insights.

There are lots of ways to find an audience insight, but often the most interesting and most useful in a creative brief focus on an emotional truth for their target audience:

• What are their ambitions?
• What are the problems than annoy them every day?
• What are they afraid of?
• Who do they trust?

There are a million and one questions like this that you can ask, so this part of the brief requires some careful thought and some consistent practice.

Audience insight examples

Transport for London's audience insight

In this impactful campaign to encourage drivers to stick to the speed limit, Transport for London (the local government body responsible for most of the transport network in London) decided not to focus on the drivers themselves, but on their passengers. They recognised that drivers who speed don't care for their own wellbeing because they don't think that they'll get in an accident if they drive over the speed limit. But what these drivers do care about is the safety and wellbeing of their passengers, particularly when they're loved ones. So TfL created a campaign that tapped into this fear that their own reckless driving could not only harm their passengers, but that their passengers were constantly uncomfortable when in the car.

Spotify's audience insight

Spotify Wrapped has been a successful engagement campaign ever since it started. And interestingly, it didn't even come from an audience insight - one of Spotify's engineers realised they had lots of listening data for their users, and began coming up with some ideas for how they could put it to use. Or so the story goes.

But the reason it became such a popular campaign is that, even accidentally, it did tap into a powerful audience insight: people love to share the music they love - and they love to brag about it. Whether it's how much music they listen to, how big a fan they are of a certain artist, or how different their music taste is to everyone else, Spotify Wrapped lets people indulge in the feeling that their opinion is valid and valued (even if no one else pays any heed to their Wrapped Instagram story).

Step 6 - Define the category truth 🥸

In this section, you need to take a top-level view of the category (or industry, vertical, sector - whatever you want to call it). The idea is that if you can understand how people think about the category, and how people behave and buy in the category, then you can better influence their decisions when it comes to choosing your brand. If you haven't already, a market segmentation is a great starting point for understanding the landscape.

There are a number of ways to think about the category, but one particularly useful method is thinking about category entry points (CEPs). Pioneered by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, CEPs are useful ways to think about how people shop in your category. Or, according to the Institute themselves, "they capture the thoughts that category buyers have as they transition into making a category purchase".

Jenni Romaniuk states that, "Category entry points are not about the brand, they're about the buyer" - which may lead you to think that CEPs are more closely linked to audience insights. But what you need to understand about CEPs is that, even though they can vary by audience, they are universal triggers that come to mind for consumers when they are buying in your category.

How to identify category entry points

There are two broad elements to identifying CEPs:

1. Need state
   What situation are people in when they most need a product in your category?

2. Determining Factors
   How do people quickly make decisions about which brand they choose within a category?

Need states usually exist outside of the immediate purchase moment. They tend to crop up when a consumer experiences a problem that a product within a certain category would solve. One of the most famous campaign ideas that stems from a need state comes from Snickers, who decided to own that most universal of need states: hunger.

Category entry point examples

Snickers' category entry point

Over several years, Snickers ran a campaign designed to associate the brand, a chunky, peanut-riddled chocolate bar, with hunger. Outside of the usual 3 meals, hunger striking at inopportune moments gets plenty of people feeling hangry, and as a substantial, sweet and salty snack, Snickers found a category entry point that they could claim - with no small amount of humour and advertising budget.

UberEats' category entry point

UberEats' 'Do Less' campaign focuses on a very particular and under-appreciated CEP: people order food so they can do nothing at home. So often, delivery services talk about speed and convenience. But UberEats narrowed into a key, underpinning reason why people value this convenience. When you order food to your house, chances are you've decided that you can't be bothered to go to the supermarket. But rather than sit there and mull that decision, you entertain yourself in whatever weird ways you choose when no one else is around. This boredom-inspired weirdness is a prime time to think about getting some food delivered, and UberEats created a campaign that associates that moment with their brand - and no other.

Step 7 - Find a cultural lever 🛤️

This topic deserves its own article - and we're writing one right now.

Well really, it deserves its own book (we might get there one day). Truthfully, if there was a quick way to 'read' culture and understand the massive forces that drive people and societies to do what they do and think what they think, then everyone would do it. And looking at all the advertising that sits around us, it's clear that not everyone does try to find a real cultural insight.

So where are you meant to start?

Observation

Yes, sadly, this means lots and lots of research. Talk to your consumers, talk to experts, read books and reports and surveys, study all the data you can get your hands on. But also, observe real life: pay attention to what appears on your FYP on TikTok, think about the conversations that your friends have over pints at the pub. And ask why.

The five Why's

This isn't a surefire route to a cultural insight. But this is a useful trick to start to find one. Like an annoying child who just learned the word "why", repeatedly ask yourself "why" when you observe something interesting. Five times seems to be the magic number.

For example:

1. A report I read says that 50% of girls stop playing sport as teenagers. Why?
2. Well, the report says that it's because of lower levels of confidence, and higher levels of negative body image amongst teenage girls. Why?
3. Teenage girls are under significantly more pressure than boys their age, particularly when it comes to playing sport. Why?
4. Girls are judged for more than their sporting ability - for things like their looks or their body shape. Why?
5. Many sports have been dominated by the men's game, and so men's sports are seen as the 'norm' while women's sports are seen as different for some reason. Why?

Decades, even centuries, of underfunding and sexist policies have lead to a state where women in sport have to be twice as good to be seen as half as worthwhile.

From a single observation, you're able to trace your way to a significant cultural force that shapes the world we live in today. It's important to remember to verify each leap you make with more research - or else you could end up with something that logically make sense, but unfortunately has no basis in reality.

Step 8 - Craft your key messages 🔑

In a creative brief, your key messages are the things you need your audience to remember in order to land your strategic proposition (more on that in a little bit). They are based on your product and brand truth, filtered through your audience insight, and supported by your category truth and cultural lever.

🏞 Simple and jargon-free

This is a brief to a creative team, not the finished article. So you don't need to write elegant, persuasive copy for your key messages.

But, since this brief is asking your creative team to do just that, your task is to be simple - but a little provocative.

The key messages in your creative brief need to be uncomplicated, but they need to spark some creative thinking. Use expressive language, use metaphors if they're helpful. But above all, keep things clear and plain.

👉 Selective

There is a limit to how many messages someone can remember from a single ad.

Think of it like asking someone with mediocre hand-eye coordination to juggle. If you throw them one ball, they can probably throw it up and catch it, no problem. Throw them four balls, however, and they won't just drop one - they'll drop them all. The same applies to your key messages: say too much, and your audience won't remember any of it.

🔎 Supported

For each key message, indicate why the brand has a right to say this. These are called RTBs (Reasons To Believe). Don't expect your creatives to include these in the finished article, whatever that might be, but think carefully. If you're asking creatives to lie about the product (for instance, if you're trying to claim something that you just cannot support), don't be surprised when you get back some vanilla, generic messaging.

If you want to really craft your key messages, check it out our handy guide on writing a compelling set of key messages.

Step 9 - Refine the strategic proposition 🫵

We're not about to take you through the ins and outs of writing strategy. Plenty has been written on the topic, and frankly, by now, we're guessing you really just want o get on with your brief.

One of the simplest frameworks you can use to summarise a strategy is the Get / To / By framework:

• Get your target audience
• To do something that will solve your problem
• By convincing/demonstrating/encouraging/demanding/pleading/etc. that they do that thing

For example:

Get Young Londoners who don't think that Nike understands what it's like to be them
To buy and wear more Nike products on the streets of London
By showing them that Nike doesn't just get what it takes to be a kid in London - they get what it takes to thrive as a kid in London.

And that's it. That's all we're giving you. We weren't kidding - if you're here to learn how to be a strategist, you might be in the wrong place. But, for those of you who do want to learn more, check out this brilliant article by Mark Pollard about how to approach strategy.

Step 10 - Lock down the considerations 🔒

This is where you need to nail down the details. Make sure you've got the following in your creative brief:

Considerations

What do you need to say in this campaign? What can you definitely not say? What needs to be in the campaign to avoid your CMO throwing a fit?

List of deliverables

What assets do you actually need to create? Give the channels, formats and number of assets that you're expecting.

Take a look at our in-depth checklist on what admin to include in your brief in our article on the topic here.

Step 11 - Inspire the creative team 🪄

If you've followed all these steps, you should have a concise, focused brief-on-a-page.

But now it's time to think about how you'd actually brief the team.

How are you going to bring the energy? How are you going to inspire them?

Here are some ideas to turn your next briefing into an inspiring mega-session:

• Turn your one-pager into a set of slides so you can tell a real story
• Tell a real story: find real-life examples or analogies to make your brief feel more real itself
• Bring in best-in-class case studies as examples and to set the bar high for your creative team
• Take it out of the office. If you're briefing them on a Nike project, why not take them to a local basketball court?
• Please, for the love of God, don't brief them over Zoom. Do it in person.

If you need any more inspiration, we've put together a few tips on how to make your next briefing more inspiring than any you've delivered before.

Creative brief example

If you've followed all 11 steps, you should end up with an inspiring creative brief. Here's an example for a fictional sports tailoring brand:

---

That's all it takes to craft the perfect creative brief. Now sit back, and wait for the magic to happen.*

*No actually, don't do that. As the person who has briefed the team, make yourself available to guide and help them as they work through their ideas - and to protect the strategy, and ensure they stay on-brief.

We promise that if you do all of that, you'll find that by the end of the creative process, you'll be pleased with what comes back.

Creative brief examples

The shape of a creative brief shifts depending on what you're selling and who you're selling to. A consumer goods launch doesn't brief the same way as a B2B SaaS campaign, and neither of them briefs the same way as a purpose-led charity piece. Here are three worked examples, each using the 11 sections from the guide above, to show how the same structure flexes.

Example 1 - Consumer goods launch (Oatly ice cream)

Project name: The Big Lick

Objective: Get young, flavour-curious dessert buyers in the UK to try Oatly's new Salted Caramel Swirl - and to tell a friend.

Problem: Shoppers still think oat-based ice cream tastes like cardboard. One scoop will change their mind. Getting them to take that scoop is the hard part.

Brand/product truth: Oatly uses the same oat base as its milk - creamy, faintly sweet - and folds in a proper molten-caramel ribbon, not a flavour swirl.

Audience insight: Gen Z flexitarians don't want to compromise on taste to feel virtuous. They'd rather eat something delicious that happens to be plant-based than something plant-based that happens to be edible.

Category truth: Ice cream is impulse-bought in the freezer aisle in under 6 seconds. Weird packaging wins.

Cultural lever: TikTok food reviewers have turned "first bite reactions" into a genre.

Strategic proposition: The dairy-free ice cream that tastes like you're cheating.

Key messages: 1) Proper molten caramel. 2) Made with oats, tastes like indulgence. 3) You won't believe it's plant-based.

Considerations: Must pass EU plant-based labelling rules. No direct dairy comparison claims.

Deliverables: OOH (6-sheet + 48-sheet), 3x :15 social cut-downs, in-store freezer wobbler, 1x launch film (up to 60s).

Example 2 - B2B campaign (HubSpot AI launch)

Project name: Quiet Co-pilot

Objective: Get heads of marketing at mid-market B2B companies to book a demo of HubSpot's new AI assistant within the first 8 weeks of launch.

Problem: Every martech vendor is shouting "AI" right now. Buyers are numb to it, and most believe the claims are overblown.

Brand/product truth: HubSpot's AI is trained on your CRM, not the open internet - so it drafts emails that sound like your team, not like ChatGPT.

Audience insight: Heads of marketing don't want another tool. They want their team to stop drowning in drafts, QA, and repetitive email variants.

Category truth: B2B buyers trust peer proof (case studies, G2 reviews) far more than vendor claims.

Cultural lever: The "AI fatigue" backlash - people are tired of tools that promise magic and deliver slop.

Strategic proposition: The AI that already knows your customers.

Key messages: 1) Trained on your CRM, not the internet. 2) Draft, don't start from scratch. 3) Your team, 10x faster.

Considerations: No comparative claims vs named competitors. Enterprise legal must approve all data-use language.

Deliverables: LinkedIn paid social (carousel + video), 1x 90-second demo film, 3x customer-story case studies, landing page.

Example 3 - Brand work (charity Christmas campaign)

Project name: The Empty Chair

Objective: Raise GBP 4m for a UK bereavement charity's helpline between mid-November and Boxing Day.

Problem: Christmas charity fatigue is real. By mid-December, donors have already given to three causes and started tuning out.

Brand/product truth: The charity's helpline answers within 30 seconds, 24 hours a day, on Christmas Day itself.

Audience insight: Grief doesn't pause for Christmas - in fact, it sharpens. The empty chair at the table is the single loudest thing in the room.

Category truth: Charity Christmas ads lean on sentimentality; donors respond to specificity and dignity, not sad piano music.

Cultural lever: The quiet honesty of films like John Lewis's "Man on the Moon" - showing loneliness without exploiting it.

Strategic proposition: When the chair is empty, we'll pick up.

Key messages: 1) Grief doesn't take Christmas Day off. 2) Neither do we. 3) Your gift answers the phone.

Considerations: Charity regulator sign-off. Must be usable across TV, social, and fundraising mail.

Deliverables: 1x 60-second TV + cutdowns, 2x fundraising DM packs, social film series (5x :30), radio (3x :30).

Common creative brief mistakes to avoid

Even experienced strategists and marketers fall into these traps. Here are the pitfalls we see most often:

• Trying to say too much. A creative brief should be a brief. If your brief is longer than one page (two at a push), you're probably including too much information. Your creative team needs focus, not a comprehensive strategy document.
• No single-minded proposition. If you can't summarise your strategy in one sentence, you haven't refined it enough. A brief with three propositions is a brief with no proposition.
• Confusing objectives with deliverables. "Make a 30-second TV ad" is a deliverable, not an objective. Your objective should describe the change you want to see in people's behaviour or attitudes.
• Briefing over email. We said it in Step 11 and we'll say it again: don't brief your creative team over email or Slack. The brief deserves a proper conversation. Context, energy, and the ability to ask questions are all lost when you just send a document.
• Skipping the insight. It's tempting to jump straight to "what we want to say" without doing the hard work of finding out what will actually resonate. A brief without an insight is just a to-do list.
• Not including a budget. Creatives need to know the scale of what they're working with. A campaign idea that works brilliantly with a multi-million-pound media budget might fall flat with a fraction of that. Don't make them guess.
• Writing it in isolation. The best briefs are collaborative. Share early drafts with your team and your agency contacts. The brief should feel owned by everyone, not dictated by one person.

Of course, if you want to make writing a great brief easy, you can always try Briefly

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a creative brief?

A creative brief is a 1-2 page document that a strategist writes to translate a marketing brief into a format that inspires the creative team to produce effective advertising. It's usually written by an agency strategist or account planner and handed to art directors, copywriters, and designers. The creative brief distils the client's business problem into a single-minded proposition, an audience insight, and a set of key messages. Unlike the marketing brief that precedes it (which informs), the creative brief exists to inspire.

What should be in a creative brief?

A creative brief should include: the communications objective, problem definition, brand/product truth, audience insight, strategic proposition, key messages, category truth, cultural lever, deliverables, and considerations. Most briefs also start with a memorable project name and end with a list of mandatories (legal, regulatory, or brand-guideline requirements). The proposition should be a single sentence, and the key messages should be limited to three at most. Keep the whole document to one page, two at a push.

What is the difference between a creative brief and a marketing brief?

A marketing brief (also called a client brief) is written by the client and outlines the business problem, objectives, target audience, and budget for their agency. A creative brief is written by the agency in response - it distils the marketing brief into a focused document designed to inspire the creative team. Think of the marketing brief as the "what" and the creative brief as the "how."

Who writes the creative brief?

Usually, a strategist or account planner at the advertising agency writes the creative brief. However, if you're a marketer working directly with a creative team, in-house studio, or production company, you may need to write it yourself. Either way, the same 11 steps apply.

How long should a creative brief be?

A creative brief should be no longer than 2 pages. Creative teams respond to single-minded, inspiring documents - not strategy decks. If your brief runs to three or four pages, it's usually a sign that you haven't refined your proposition enough, or that you're trying to cover too many audiences in one go. Move supporting research and data into an appendix and keep the brief itself tight.

Is a creative brief the same as an advertising brief?

Yes - in most modern usage, "creative brief" and "advertising creative brief" refer to the same document: the brief an agency writes to inspire its creative team. Historically, some agencies used "advertising brief" to refer specifically to briefs for paid media campaigns (TV, print, OOH), reserving "creative brief" for broader creative work including design and branding. Today the distinction has mostly collapsed. If you're writing a brief for any creative team that will produce advertising, the 11 steps in this guide apply.

What makes a good creative brief?

The best creative briefs are single-minded (one clear proposition), insight-driven (built on a genuine truth about the audience), and inspiring (they make the creative team excited to work on the project). They balance strategic rigour with creative freedom - giving enough direction to be useful, but enough space for surprising ideas to emerge.