A good brief is not a long one. It answers four questions: what you sell, who you want to reach, what you want to be different in six months, and what you can spend. Everything else is detail an agency can ask for.
The reason this matters is practical. Vague briefs produce vague proposals, and vague proposals are impossible to compare. If three agencies quote you three different scopes, you are not choosing between agencies — you are guessing.
The four things to include
- What you sell, in plain language, and who buys it today
- Who you want to reach that you are not reaching now
- What success looks like in six months — stated as a change, not a number you made up
- The budget range you are working within
Say the budget
Withholding the budget is the single most common mistake, and it works against you. Agencies are not trying to spend all of it — they are trying to work out which version of the work is possible. Without a range, you get a proposal built on a guess, and it is usually the wrong shape.
A range is enough. Saying you are working somewhere between two figures, or that you are not sure yet and want to understand the options, is far more useful than silence.
The thing most briefs leave out
What has already been tried, and what happened. If you ran ads last year and stopped, say so and say why. If a previous agency did not work out, say what went wrong. This is not awkward — it is the most valuable information in the whole brief, because it stops you paying to repeat something that already failed.
What you do not need
- A finished strategy — that is what you are hiring for
- Exact deliverable counts, unless you genuinely know you need them
- A formal document. A clear email or a voice note is completely fine
- Invented target numbers. If you do not have a benchmark, say so
The best briefs we receive are usually three paragraphs and completely honest about what is not working.