Creative Brief and Ad Strategy Templates

• Who is the target audience for the ad?

• What is their accepted customer belief? 
  • What do they believe now?
  • What are their pain points and emotional hot buttons about the category of products/services/companies?  About the specific type of product/service being sold?

• What one message will be most compelling?
  
  • It's the key message - that means one or two, not five. 
  • What's the emotional benefit?

• How can you substantiate this message? 
  • What facts and evidence do you have to substantiate any claims?
  • What's the rational information that will make this message believable?
  • You'll need to be sure to adhere to advertising laws if you are making any competitive claims. 

Most advertising briefs are grounded in solid Advertising Research

From our experience: Every agency has it's own format for a marketing creative brief or an ad strategy.  If you're working with an agency, you'll want to use their method because all their people are trained on how to execute to that.  If you're working with freelancers or want to develop an overall creative brief for all your marketing that may be done by different agencies and/or freelancers, you'll find these templates a useful starting point.

 

Advertising Creative Brief and Strategy

 

These articles will be helpful:

• Advertising Strategy. - Do you have a winning advertising strategy?  A message or idea that is so compelling it will help an ad agency or freelancers create great advertising?  Learn what you need to do before you give an ad agency or freelancer an assignment to "create an ad".  An ad strategy is how you set your expectations for what you want the advertising to achieve and what key message you want to focus on.  It defines your scope of work and success measures.  An ad agency will want to work with you to create the ad strategy.  They may call this a creative brief.

• Positioning Statements - Your positioning statement sums up in a few sentences what makes your business, product, service or non-profit organization different from the competition.  It should answer: Why buy this/use this?  See examples and learn how to write a persuasive positioning statement.

• Effective Advertising  - Your ad agency shows you several ad concepts.  How do you choose the most effective ad? The cost of creating and producing an ad is generally a small fraction of the cost for media to run the ad.  To get the best ROI on your ad budget, you'll need to discern which is the most effective ad to run or the most effective ad concepts to test. This how-to guide covers that.

• Great Advertising - what great advertising is (and isn't)

• Advertising Effectiveness - this article explains how to establish clear advertising objectives and success measures before an ad runs so you can then answer the question, "So, was the ad effective?  Did it work?" 

• It's helpful to agree upfront if and how the ad(s) will be tested.
  • This article on Ad Testing will be helpful to review.

• Advertising Tips

  • Get advertising tips from ad experts about what works and what doesn't in advertising so your advertising will be more successful.  Add your tips!