How to brief an agency so the first round is usable

Most first rounds are unusable for a boring reason. The brief asked for theatre. "Bring the brand to life." "Make us famous." "A big idea that can live across channels." These are not instructions. They are invitations to guess what the organisation will recognise as its own, and then to be punished for guessing wrong. The agency is not confused because it lacks talent. It is confused because the client has not yet decided the things a first round needs.

A usable first round is not a finished campaign. It is work that can be argued about on the merits: this claim, this audience, this refusal, this surface. That only happens when the brief has already done the deciding. The rest is craft. Craft cannot compensate for a vacuum. It will decorate the vacuum, and you will pay for the decoration twice — once in the pitch, once in the revisions.

This is a practice essay. It is about the page you write before anyone books a room, and about the Australian rooms that page has to survive: a procurement officer, a lawyer, a CFO, a state manager, a person who actually opens the store.

What a brief is for

A brief is a constraint that an outsider can use. It is not a company history. It is not a dump of last year's tracking. It is not a list of stakeholders who would like to be excited. It is the smallest set of facts and decisions that would let a capable team produce work you could put in front of a customer without starting again.

If you cannot write that set, you are not ready to brief. You are ready to pay someone to run a workshop you should have run internally. Workshops have a place. They are not a substitute for a brief. An agency that offers to "find the brief with you" on a paid discovery can be useful. An RFT that asks five firms to find the brief for free is how Australian procurement buys theatre.

Write the brief as if the reader is intelligent, new to your politics, and will be blamed for a wrong first round. That reader exists. They joined the agency last month. They will not know that "innovative" is a forbidden word because of a 2019 board paper, unless you say so.

The anatomy that kills theatre

The job

One sentence about what this piece of work is for, in the business, not in the awards entry. We need a name that can be registered. We need a pack that can win a facing in a category review. We need a brand system that a panel printer can hit. We need a campaign that will sell a specific SKU in a specific window without training the customer to wait for 20 per cent off. If you cannot name the job, you will be sold a film.

The job should include a stop condition. What would make you cancel the work. A legal block. A ranging loss. A merger. A budget that only exists until December. Agencies can work with bad news. They cannot work with a job that changes in the playback because nobody wrote the first one down.

The audience as a choice, not a demographic

"Australians 25–54 who value quality" is a media buying segment wearing a research wig. A brief needs the choice the person is actually making. Weekly shop versus specialist. Home loan versus staying with the parents. Trade account versus the other warehouse. Enrolment versus a different campus. The positioning should already have named that choice. If it has not, do not ask the agency to invent a market. Ask them, if you must, to help you write the position — and pay for that as strategy, not as a creative round.

Name the person who can veto the purchase. In Australian categories it is often not the person in the tracking study. It is a category manager, a parent, a CFO, a clinician, a site supervisor, a procurement panel. If they are not in the brief, they will arrive in the feedback, and the first round will be rewritten around them.

The constraint

What you will not do. Price. Tone. Claims the ACCC or the industry code will not let you support. Channels you cannot staff. A celebrity the chair likes and the brand cannot survive. A colour that fails in the sun. A word the lawyer will strike. Write these as a list you are prepared to be embarrassed by. Soft constraints — "we'd prefer not to feel premium" — will be negotiated away in the room. Hard constraints survive a charismatic creative director.

If everything is possible, the first round will be a menu. Menus look generous. They are how you spend the second month choosing a direction you should have briefed.

The proof

The operational fact that makes the claim expensive to copy. Rostered butchers. A returns policy finance has funded. A call-centre hour that is actually staffed. A formulation. A location. A licence. If the proof is a previous ad, you are asking the new work to be a sequel. Sequels are allowed. Do not call them strategy.

Attach evidence. A one-pager from operations is worth more than a brand tracker slide that says you are "seen as trusted". Trusted to do what. By whom. Against whom. Australian organisations have a lot of trust scores and very few sentences about the behaviour the score is supposed to describe.

What done looks like

This is the part briefs skip, and the part that decides whether the first round is usable.

Done is not "a campaign we love". Done is a set of surfaces and a standard they have to meet. A 30-second and a 15, a retail kit a store manager can use without a producer, a landing page that legal has already seen a skeleton of, a pack that can be printed in the window you have, a brand book that survives procurement rather than a launch film. Name the surfaces. Name the ones that are out of scope. Name the file types your organisation can actually open.

Done also has a decision. Who says yes, on what date, with what money released. If the true decision-maker is not in the briefing, do not pretend the room is the client. Write the path. Australian work dies in the unnamed second meeting — the one with the secretary, the minister, the state manager, the franchisee council. Put that meeting in the brief or stop being surprised by it.

Inputs, not archaeology

Agencies need inputs. They do not need your intranet.

Give them the current identity, the current offer, the current price architecture, the last campaign and what it did, the complaints, the legal lines that cannot move, the competitor set as the customer would name it, and the operational limits. Give them the annual report if you are listed, because the work will be read against it. Give them the tender language if you sell to government, because a listed rebrand and a panel submission are often the same organisation describing itself twice.

Do not give them forty PDFs and a link to a portal nobody in your own marketing team can navigate. If a document is optional, say so. If a document is forbidden to leave the building, do not put it in a WeTransfer and then panic. Brief under the same disclosure rules you expect the agency to keep.

Do not ask for a "competitive audit" as a paid way of delaying your own thinking. You already know who you lose to. Write the names. If you do not know, you have a research job, not a creative job.

Audiences inside the organisation

The brief has internal audiences, and they will edit the work whether or not they are invited.

Procurement wants a scope that can be contracted: deliverables, rounds, usage, kill fees, who owns the files. If that is vague, you will get a beautiful first round and a fight about the fourth. Write the commercial terms in the brief or in a one-page annex. Do not leave them to the "we'll sort the paperwork later" conversation that Australian mid-market work still runs on.

Legal wants the claims. Give them the brief before the agency does, or give the agency the claims register at the same time. A first round that has to be emptied of verbs after legal sees it was not a first round. It was a rehearsal.

State or regional managers want to know whether the work can run in their catchment without a rewrite. If the answer is no, the brief should say that metropolitan is the job. If the answer is yes, regional Australia cannot be a footnote about media weight. It is an input: distribution, service, the line that will not play in Townsville.

Staff want to know what they will have to say. If the work will change a script, put a script in the definition of done. Otherwise the first Monday will rewrite your idea, and the agency will be blamed for operations.

How to run the briefing so the room does not become the brief

Send the page before the meeting. The meeting is for questions and for the things that are still politically hard to write. If you only speak the brief, you do not have one. You have a performance, and the agency will take notes on the loudest person.

Do not brief by committee live. If six stakeholders need to be heard, hear them before you send the document, and put the resolved decisions in the document. A live argument about purpose in front of the agency is a request for the agency to parent you. Some will. You will pay for the parenting forever.

Show the surfaces. A photograph of the shelf, the branch, the app empty state, the letter, the tender cover. Australian brands are still briefed as if the primary surface were a 48-sheet. It is not. The primary surface is usually a screen a tired person is holding, or a pack under a fluorescent tube, or a PDF that will be printed in greyscale. Brief those.

Leave with a shared definition of the first round. How many routes. How finished. Whether you want tissue or a fake finish that will lock a bad idea because it has music. Tissue is kinder to the work and harder on the ego. Fake finish is how Australian clients fall in love with a frame and then discover the idea cannot extend.

What to do with the first round

Score it against the brief before you score it against your taste. Did it use the audience. Did it break a constraint. Did it spend a proof you do not have. Could a store manager explain it. Could a lawyer substantiate it. If you need a reminder of the kill test, it is the same test as a positioning: if nothing in the room can be refused, you did not brief, you hosted.

Give notes that are decisions, not adjectives. "Make it warmer" is how you get a smile on a problem that needed a fact. "Lead with the return policy, cut the journey language, keep the trade SKU out of the hero" is a note. Write notes once, from one owner. Conflicting notes from a steering group are a new brief, delivered late.

If the first round is unusable and the brief was vague, do not punish the agency for your vacuum. Rewrite the brief. That is cheaper than three more rounds of guessing. If the brief was tight and the work ignored it, that is also information. It will be useful when you decide who to hire next.

A page you could send tomorrow

You do not need a template from a network. You need a page with the job, the choice, the constraint, the proof, the surfaces, the decision path and the stop condition. Attach the evidence. Date it. Put a name on it — a person, not a department — who will answer questions within two days.

If that page embarrasses you, good. It is embarrassing to discover you do not know the audience, or that the CFO has not agreed the proof, or that legal will not let you say the only interesting sentence. Better to discover it in a document than in a first-round playback with the agency's leadership on the call and your chief executive in the room performing surprise.

Theatre is enjoyable. It is also how Australian organisations spend a quarter and still do not have a thing they can put on a shelf. Write the page. Send it. Let the first round be about the work. That is what a brief is for. The mood can wait until you have something to be in the mood about.