A creative brief is a document used by creative professionals and agencies to develop creative deliverables: visual design, copy, advertising, web sites, etc. The document is usually developed by the requestor (in most cases a marketing team member) and approved by the creative team of designers, writers, and project managers. In some cases, the project's creative brief may need creative director approval before work will commence.
In advertising agencies, creative briefs are written after the client briefs the agency (client brief). After receiving the client brief, account manager is responsible to sort the data out to come up with a creative brief (may be in collaboration with creative director).
The creative brief, consisting of a series of simple questions asked by the creative team and answered by the requestor, becomes the guidepost for the development of the creative deliverable. As with many strategic documents, if the project goes off track referring back to this mutually agreed upon document to see where the divergence began is helpful.
Creative briefs can come in many flavors and are usually tailored to the agency or group that is developing the creative deliverable. They know which questions (and answers) are of paramount importance to them in order to deliver a high-quality creative execution.
A creative brief may contain:
A creative brief must be directional and inspirational. Directional elements refer to marketing elements (target market, objectives,message, etc.) and inspirational elements refer to tone of voice, feeling of the advertisement.