Jo Rogers

Welcome back to another episode of Client Success Matters. Today I have with me Andrea Sullivan, Creative Director at Transmission to talk about briefs. I've actually known Andrew since we were kids, so it feels very full circle to have him on the podcast with me today. I'm quite nostalgic really. Having both been in agency roles for over 20 years, we have never actually quite worked in the same agency at the same time.

So Andrew, who would have thought when we were 15 years old that nearly 30 years later, we'd be sat on this podcast together discussing the importance of briefs in agency world.

Andrew

Yeah, I probably didn't even know what podcasts were at the time. Probably didn't even exist.

Jo Rogers

Didn't even know what we wanted to be at 15, let's be fair. So all jokes aside, this is actually a really important topic and I know it's a huge pain point felt by many, many agencies. So thank you for taking the time to talk to us about this.

Andrew, you have a long history of working in agencies and I am sure you have seen a multitude of different briefs over your time. Well, what do you think constitutes a good brief and why is it so critical in the creative process?

Andrew

Yeah, think if you break it down to make it really simple, it's just about setting the problem up that you're trying to solve. I mean, that's really what a brief is there for. And I think very often we can fall into the trap of thinking that a brief is kind of a project ticket, so to speak, where actually all it's doing is just making a, starting a project rather than actually being arguably one of the more creative parts of a project. so briefs are really important, but it's also really important to understand exactly what their job is. And it isn't purely to brief the creative team as such, it's to align client and agency, it's to align everyone working on that project, whether that be client services, might be planning, might be strategy, might be project managers. It's making sure that everyone is all on the same page. Yes, it is obviously a launch pad for the best creative possible. that's what, so certainly from my buyers perspective, from a creative point of view, I'm always looking to try and make it as much of a kind of Kickstarter and a sort of inspirational piece, as much as it is just telling us what from the brief is this week so you look, yeah, it's, it's massively important. the frustrating thing with briefs is I don't think anyone's ever really got it exactly right. It kind of works differently for different agencies. So I my time at Ogilvy, the briefing process was obviously very tried and tested and robust through that. But somewhere like transmission, what they need is a slightly different form of brief, which I'm sure we'll talk about a bit later, which had to be kind of redesigned to fit that agency's purpose.

this current and transmissions purpose and it's working really well and it's amazing the difference in what a brief can do and how you set up a brief and how you sort of educate on briefs and how it can change the trajectory of projects moving forward and I think that is very specifically especially over my time in the industry I realized that there's no kind of one brief to rule them all it's very much a brief that suits the style of the agency that you where you are at the moment and I think that's really important.

I think that's a really interesting point there, Angie, that you make because I think a lot of people just think it's, I can just grab a brief template and just use that within my agency and then it's still not working. So why is it not working? And I think you're absolutely right. Hit the nail on the head there. That brief has to be completely specific to your agency, your services, your products, what you're trying to achieve. I know clients, you've mentioned client services in there and I know that client services are responsible a lot for these briefs.

But what do you think should be the role of client services in the creative process? Obviously, particularly related to the brief, but what should their role be when they are working with someone like yourself or your team? Look, think client services are often overlooked and I think more and more internal agencies, client services almost feel like just sort of middleman between client and creative. it's so much more than that. The most successful projects that we've worked on, the client services play an absolutely fundamental role in making sure that that

Not just that we get the brief right, not just that we set up our clients so that they are willing to accept sort of different creative or sort of less ordinary stuff. But it's also then when we do get a brilliant idea through to the client and we make them realize the benefit of it, it's then making sure that doesn't veer off track and that that creative doesn't get kind of diluted or watered down.

The client services are the people there that are always there supporting the clients to say that you're doing the right thing, this is exactly what we should be doing, trust us on this bit, and they're experts in everything. So it's not just the middle person. The client services are fundamental in making the best creative projects as creative as possible.

Yeah. And actually it seems to cause a lot of tension, doesn't it? Not just with creative teams, but with other departments. The brief comes over and it's not quite right. It causes a lot of unnecessary back and forth and then delays of work. And then it sort of turns into this blame game, doesn't it? It's like, well, client services feel like the creative or the other departments should have pushed back. They feel like their brief should have been stronger. And it sort of always sort of ends up.

ultimately landing on the client services as the ones that have done wrong. Do you think that's fair or, you know, through everything that you've been doing recently, how can agencies sort of improve this process to make it a little bit more seamless, to ensure that those departments work well together so we don't have this? Because I feel like it's always the tension point. As you say, you know, it feels like, it's just client servicing, just...

giving us information with no thinking behind it. Yeah, so I think that's completely it. I think the game is, know, the sort of game that we're trying to do here is we're trying to get client services to be as interested in the project as, you know, a creative is or however, you know, they will have to be invested, invested in that project and really excited by it. So it shouldn't just be, and I think it's probably historical and, you know, there are different individuals that do this better than others.

But I think the key is to get everyone on that project on board and excited by the prospect of what that brief is going to fulfill. Once you get to that point, the trust in everyone then comes together. When it feels like it's a kind of a, almost like a parking lot of projects where actually all you're doing is just one to the other, one to the other, then naturally that sort of team doesn't feel like they're really cohesive.

And when you feel like that, that's when sort of blaming comes in. Whereas when, when everyone is equally invested in the outcome of a project, those tend to sort of disappear. There isn't that blame game because everyone's trying to think of what role they can play in order to make that project a success. And rather than thinking, let's try and see what happens with this project. Let's try and just get it through and out. And that's where briefing really, really is the Kickstarter. It's the bit that we should take the most time on because it

pulls everyone in and gets everyone on the same page. It's not just about trying to articulate to the creators the problem they're trying to solve. It's trying to make everyone in that process within the agency feel like this project could go somewhere brilliant, but it needs everybody to work towards it. Yeah, it's interesting as well, isn't it? Because I suppose it goes back to that piece where if client services are acting like a transactional department and they are not...

invested in the client and they're not invested in what they're trying to achieve and they're not invested in the strategy and they don't understand it, then how can they possibly write a brief that's going to be comprehensive for any other departments? Because they're just not going to know that. They are going to be looking at it from a transactional point of view, aren't they? Which is, think, where a lot of these things fall down when client services don't know enough about what they're actually doing and why they're actually doing it in the first place. And I've certainly noticed a lot

when, you know, briefs gets created in agencies that they then go and sit down the client services and go, right, this is how you fill it in. And they never talk about the why. They never talk about the importance and the why this information needs to be in there. It's just a, this is what I need. And I think if you're not, as a client services person, you're not thinking about the why, it just becomes like, well,

I saw in this document, there was this, cut it and paste it and plonk it in and I cut it, paste it and plonk it in. And I think that that to me is such a missing key piece to this is really getting them trained to understand the importance of what this document can actually do and the efficiencies it can have down the line. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't agree with that more. You know, it reminds me of when I moved from Ogilvy over to transmission to sort of try and help them.

their creative offering. So, you know, my task there is to come in and change the way that transmission are viewed as a creative agency, because at the time it was a bit more of a sort of studio type thing. It was even called the studio and I kind of, there's a number of things which I needed to do. I said to the MD at the time, said, I'm not going to focus on getting loads of really amazing creatives through the door. What I'm going to do is I'm going to focus on how those, how the briefs are coming in. I'll speak to client services and I'll see where that gap is because

It's all well and good, us creators coming up with can lines every time we come up with, we re -ideate stuff. If the client's not ready to buy it, if the brief's wrong, and if we don't have the relationship with that client, it doesn't matter how good the creative is, it's just never gonna go through. So in order to raise our creative output transmission, I had to go looking outside of the creative department first, and exactly what you're saying there, education is fundamental. And you're right, it's the why.

specifically at Transmission, and you'll probably remember from working there, know, that we often talk about starting with why, but our briefs didn't reflect that. So I sort of went through the really painful process of trying to write a brief that kind of fit what I needed. And the way that I sort of got to, or the solution I got to with that was to, instead of, like you say, making all of the sections on a brief, the typical things, background, mandatories.

target audience, that kind of stuff, which inherently makes people want to kind of copy and paste. So you get that lot sort of background and you'd have the opening two paragraphs off the website. And it's kind of, okay, that's useless. Yeah. So my approach was to force that behavior not to happen by making every section a question. So it's not just statement. know, every section is why does this brief exist?

what's the problem we're trying to solve, even to an extent where I'm saying, you know, what's the key decision maker on this process like? Because they're not just there for the creatives themselves when they're being briefed. It's so that everyone in the process is thinking about these things that we need to make sure a project is as successful as possible. And also they're inherently things that can't be copied and pasted. We have a client facing brief, which is where we'll go to the client and say, you've got a project, answer these questions, and it will be able to write a brief off of it.

Those questions are deliberately different to the ones that are in our agency brief so that people can't just copy and paste the answers the client give. They are set up so that they give the right information to be able to fill that brief out, but not sort of direct answers. You have to read it, interpret it, and kind of get into it. So what that's doing is that's an attempt as an education piece to make people really think about what the purpose of the brief is.

We've been pretty successful to now. there's the odd teething problem with it as there always is, but certainly people are understanding a lot more the importance of a brief and that it's more than, like I said at the start, this kind of project ticket to get stuff done. That what you're doing is actually forcing the hand of client services to elevate themselves and move away from just a project led focus and actually

really understand their clients so much better than what they are at the moment. you know, I think taking that approach, and I actually haven't seen that before, the approach of asking the questions, thinking about who the person is, because ultimately, at the end of the day, client service is there to be the voice of the customer. So they have to embody that, don't they? They have to embody that insight to you, because ultimately what they'll do as well by doing that is create efficiencies.

So you're going to know so much more about who the client is, what they're trying to achieve and what the actual client is expecting to see. So that when it comes over, it's more likely to hit the mark rather than at that point, client service is coming in going, well, actually, I'm not quite sure that's going to resonate so much or they want to be more involved in the creative process or they want, whatever it is that they come up with.

it's sort of mitigating that one step beforehand, isn't it? Rather than doing it down the line after you've done a ton of work and suddenly you end up being late in deliveries and, you know, spending unnecessary time on work when if you'd know all that upfront, it would have probably driven your ideas and your output very differently. Yeah. And also put simply, you know, we might be dealing with a client that we haven't dealt with before and

Like you say, we might waste loads of time coming up with amazing, can -line winning ideas and actually they just want BAU and it's just a waste of time. But it's not really for that so much. It's much more about forcing the hand to think about the client and think about what the job is, what the brief is, how this project is going to go, look at the sort of bigger picture on the process of it.

You know, I'm a big believer, you for those of you, for those people who are listening to this talk, who probably will be very aware of Rory Sutherland, but I'm a massive fan of nudges. things that are things that change people's behaviors, but don't feel like they're being dictated to. one of the things as an example, I wanted my creatives to be better at self assessing their own work. So not just sort of blindly sending stuff, but sort of doing their work and self assessing. So rather than telling my creatives that

you need to self assess. All I do is every time I see work from them, they'll know the first question I'm going to ask is, what don't you like about it? Okay. And they know I'm going to ask that question. So because I'm going to ask that question, they ask themselves that question before. So it kind of forces them to have an answer, which makes them self assess. And that's what the briefing thing does is

you're technically still getting the same information. Yes, it should be a better brief, but you're still getting relatively similar information. But it's the way that it's made means that the people involved in making that brief are much more conscious of what that project is doing. And for us, certainly at Transmission, it's as much an education piece as a briefing document. I love that. I'm going to take that into things that I'm working with people on. I love that. Just little nudges just to make people rethink. I think a lot of us do that.

you know, sometimes we get a little bit too complacent, don't we? We sort of done our project, send it on, and don't actually think to ourselves, is this the best piece of work I could do? What's, you know, or am I just ticking a box, like you say, and passing on? I think that's relevant across the board and loads of different things. I love that. So when we talked before, you mentioned that you and you've mentioned in the podcast as well already that you did like a big audit essentially on your briefs within transmission.

Sort of for those of them, those that listening that are thinking about probably needing to do the same thing, have you got any sort of hints and tips and advice and guidance? mean, I love the fact that you said, you know, you talk about the fact that, you know, you would include questions rather than asking statements and stuff. when you went through that, there must have been quite a bit of learning for you. What would, what would you be your sort of top advice for someone that's going to go through the same process for this? Yeah, I mean,

As anyone listening who will know, agencies are really terrible at this stuff, changing things internally. can take forever. we, Transmission, we'd kind of started the process a couple of years ago. And loads of people in a room, everyone having sort of their two penises and just trying to sort of work out, you know, and before you know it, end up, know, that whole saying, a camel's a horse designed by committee, right?

it came into that. So quite frankly, what I did is I had this idea about what it could be. And so I just did it. I just went, you know, I'm just going to write this brief about what I think might work. And then I'm going to go around to people and go, what do you think of this? Rather than sort of going, what would you like in a brief? this kind of thing, before you know it just ends up as the same old brief that everyone else has got. So my advice, the sort of short advice there is just write it down because most people

at the level that we're talking about who are going to be helping to redesign the briefs for an agency. They know what they're doing and they probably know what the answer is already. And yes, do look at tried and tested briefing documents, things like BBHs and mothers, old AMVs. You look at those and see those ones that are tried and tested, work and then ask yourself, would that work for us? Why wouldn't it work for us or would it work?

You can kind of piece together from that what you think would fit best. You don't need to necessarily reinvent, you're not reinventing the wheel so much. You're just producing a document that's right for the agency at the time. If I go off and work at any other agency at any other point in my career, I don't know whether I'd take this briefing document with me because I don't know whether it would work for certain agents. It certainly wouldn't have worked at Ogilvy because they didn't need that kind of approach. yeah, so the advice is just

just do it, just start it, write it down, have a go and go from there, rather than trying to take on this seemingly unwieldy process of redoing the briefs and everyone kind of freaked out and was like, my God, we're doing a new briefs and it's really not that big a deal. Just make sure it's right. Yeah. And then, so how did you then roll that out to everyone? So obviously you're comfortable with it. How did you then roll that out to, was it only to client services or was it like, did other...

other departments need to be part of it? Like, how did that process look? Yeah, it's fun. It's such a political whirlwind trying to get a new briefing system. So the approach that I took, and it did work, is that I basically took it to the people in the agency who I knew would be interested in the change and were senior enough to sort of get behind it.

And then I started using some senior CS people. Yes, I went into that first and sort of said, what do you think? People who I knew didn't need as much education as some others. And so I'd go and speak to them and sort of say, you know, what do you think of this kind of thing? And then when I launched it as well, this, think really helped was I basically said, launched it in February, I think it was, but I said, this is still kind of in beta until June.

The reason that really helped is because I wasn't saying to everyone, this is it. No changing, don't care what you say kind of thing. And so it allowed people to be a bit more accepted to it and kind of go, okay, so this is kind of still a test. I mean, it's not really going to change that much, but it just gives that opportunity for people to not feel like they're just being told, here's a new brief, go and use it. It's more a question of sort of soft launching it.

And to the point where everyone just then starts using it sort of ubiquitously. So that would be my advice on that. Do it sort of underhanded and sort of sneak it through the agency. then before you know it, it'll be... Everyone's doing it. Slowly forcing the hand. So did you do like a training session with Client Services on how to fill it in or was that just left to like senior...

senior guys, how did that one work? Yeah, the idea first was to go through here's the debriefing document. You know, it's one of these things where it's got limited, limited amount of space, you know, that kind of thing. It's not so you can't have like massive long answers in each thing. It's one page, but gives room for more information through links if you want to do it somewhere else. And so we did, we went through kind of how it works, because we wanted to see how people would interpret it first. And we

just about to go through actual training on each of the questions, why they exist, why they're important, the things that they should be looking to sort of put in, you know, not just put in there, but, you know, the interpretation of certain things off of that briefing. And again, going back to the original point, those sessions are going to be more about almost the importance of briefing as much as the brief itself. and so by then people would have had a bit of time to get used to the actual form.

And then we can sort of go into, right, what do these things mean? Why are they important? And why do they exist in there? Yeah. Yeah. It's funny, isn't it? You can't just come in and just change something. It does need to be a sort of a process, doesn't it, behind it. And I suppose in a way, you know, that's why agencies actually just need to start on things. You know, you've identified, you know, something within your agency that needs changing.

start because it does take time to then implement it. So the longer you wait, the longer it is till that thing is going to be implemented. It's good to end up being like a year down the line until you do it. But it's always just worth starting it. And I think you're right. I thought it was a good point that you made there as well, because I've seen it so many times this. Let's get everyone in a room and let's all decide what should happen.

to this particular document, whatever it is that you're doing. And then it's this, you know, everyone by committee and you never get anywhere. I've been in so many meetings like that where you just go round and round and round and there's no one person just making a decision. And it sort of has this feeling like you're trying to involve everyone, but it actually just means that nothing ever progresses because you've got too many conflicting ideas on it and no one taking true ownership of it. And then it just sort of falls by the wayside. Yeah, absolutely.

That's a, know, if you want it to get done, write the brief that you think should be roughly what it needs to be, then have that meeting. You know, it's kind of going, instead of going in and saying, right, what should we have in the brief? It's going in and saying, here's what I think the brief should be. Anyone got any major issues with what I've done here? And you kind of, it just speeds the process up so much. And like you say, you don't end up with this kind of diluted committee made.

Yeah, for sure. 100%. I'm going to keep it nice and succinct and short today because I think that this has been super useful, Andrew. I know, because in every agency I've ever worked in, briefing process is the absolute bane of client services lives. And I'm sure to every other department's lives as well. it's really good to get your perspective on, because I know you've just been through this process, it's really good to get your perspective on new

how you've done it, what's the importance, really getting agencies to understand that this isn't just a simple, let's fill in a document and pass it over. You need to have really good, rich insights in there to help your departments, but also it's equally as important to make sure that those that are filling it in understand the importance and the why behind filling it in as well. So they're not just sitting there cutting and pasting, cutting and pasting into it as well.

So yeah, really appreciate you taking the time out and know you're super busy. So I really, really do appreciate it. It's great to catch up. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I feel like I could talk about these things for ages, but... It's always like that. Honestly, sometimes I'm an hour down the line and I'm like, I'm not sure anyone's going to be listening now. So I think stop. I'm like sadly always that much. Yeah. Well, thank you very much, Andrew. It's great to chat. yeah, speak soon. Speak to you