Creative Brief — one page, zero follow-up questions

Bad creative is usually a bad brief wearing the designer's name. "Make it pop" plus a website link is not a brief; it delegates strategy to the person hired for craft. A real brief makes one decision unavoidable — the single thought the audience must be left with — and gives the maker everything needed to land it without guessing.

Inputs

• What is being made and the outcome it must cause: $ARGUMENTS
• From marketing-brief.md if present: positioning & message, the customer section (pains, desires, language bank — the insight comes from here, not from imagination), the offer, the voice rules, and the banned-phrases list.

Do this

1. Nail the objective: the business outcome this one asset serves and the single metric that will say it worked. One asset, one objective — an asset with two objectives needs two briefs or one decision.
2. Define the audience in one paragraph, ending with the insight — the true, specific thing about how they feel or behave that this creative turns. It must be evidenced from the brief's customer section; a made-up insight briefs a made-up audience.
3. Write the single-minded proposition: the ONE thought the viewer leaves with, one sentence, plain language. If it contains "and", cut it in half and pick.
4. Add the support: the two or three proof points that make the proposition believable, ranked, drawn from the brief's evidence only.
5. List mandatories and exclusions:
   • Logo, handle, and brand rules that are genuinely non-negotiable.
   • Claim and legal constraints — what may not be said or shown.
   • The banned-phrases list from the brief, attached in full.
   • Tone shown by example — one line written in the intended register beats a paragraph describing it.
6. Attach two or three references, each with one line on what to take from it (pace, framing, energy). References teach the level, never the answer.
7. Close with specs and process: format, dimensions or duration, safe zones, the deliverables list, deadline, who signs off, and how many feedback rounds — one is the target.

Output

The one-page brief: objective and metric, audience and insight, single-minded proposition, support, mandatories and exclusions, references with notes, specs and sign-off. If it spills past a page, cut context — never the proposition.

Rules

• One proposition. The brief's whole job is protecting the work from the second message.
• Evidence over invention: the insight and every support point trace to the brief or the user, or they get flagged as assumptions — not passed off as fact.
• Every mandatory earns its slot. Ten mandatories is strategy abdicating to a checklist.
• Feedback rounds judge the work against the brief, not against taste. If the work meets the brief and still feels wrong, the brief was wrong — fix it and say so.