How to write a creative brief (with template).

Most creative briefs produce bad work. Not because the creative team is bad. Because the brief was written backward. It started from the proposed solution and worked backward to a justification, instead of starting from the problem and giving the creative team room to find the right solution.

The brief is the highest-leverage document in the creative process. Get it right, and the work has a chance of being good. Get it wrong, and the best creative team in the world will produce mediocre output, because they're solving the wrong problem.

Here's the seven-section brief that produces useful creative briefs across brand, campaign, content, and AI projects. Plus a template you can copy.

01Section 1: The problem (not the solution)

The first thing wrong with most briefs is that they describe the proposed solution and ask the creative team to execute it. "We need a new homepage." "We need a TikTok campaign." "We need an AI agent for sales."

These are solutions, not problems. The right starting point is one level above: what problem are we solving that this work would address? The problem behind "we need a new homepage" might be "our conversion rate dropped" or "we're entering a new segment" or "the brand has evolved past what the homepage shows." Each of those problems calls for a different homepage.

Write the problem in one paragraph. Specific. Concrete. Honest about the actual issue, not the diplomatic version.

02Section 2: The audience (specific, not demographic)

Most briefs describe audience in demographic terms: "women 25-45, household income $75K+, urban or suburban." This is useless for creative work. It tells the creative team almost nothing about how to reach the audience or what to say.

Replace demographic descriptors with behavioral ones. Who are these people, what do they currently believe about this category, what habits define their week, what would have to be true for them to change behavior?

Concrete is better than comprehensive. Pick the audience that matters most. Describe them as a specific person, not a segment. The creative team can extrapolate from a vivid specific. They can't from a fuzzy general.

03Section 3: The constraint

Every project has constraints. Budget. Timeline. Brand guidelines. Channel limitations. Legal review requirements. Most briefs hide constraints, partly because the people writing the brief don't want to seem like they're limiting creativity.

Hidden constraints don't go away. They just emerge late, after the creative team has built work that violates them. Surface the single hardest constraint upfront. What's the one thing this work can't do, even if it would be otherwise correct?

Constraints are not enemies of good creative. They're inputs. The best creative often comes from constraints that force the team to work harder.

04Section 4: The success metric

How will you know if the work succeeded? Most briefs answer this with multiple metrics: "increase awareness AND drive conversions AND reinforce the brand AND lift engagement." Multiple-metric answers are no-metric answers in disguise.

Pick one. What's the single number that, if it moves, this work was worth doing? Other metrics can be secondary trackers. One has to be the primary.

If you genuinely can't pick one, the brief isn't ready. The lack of a clear success metric usually indicates that the underlying strategy isn't clear. Fix that before writing the brief.

05Section 5: The non-goals

Equally important to what the work IS for is what it ISN'T for. Non-goals prevent scope creep, prevent the creative team from optimizing for the wrong things, and prevent the inevitable end-of-project additions that turn good briefs into mediocre work.

Examples of useful non-goals: "This is not a product launch — don't lead with feature messaging." "This is not optimized for direct response — performance metrics are not the success criterion." "This is not building toward a new visual identity — stay within current brand system."

List 3-5 non-goals. Be specific about what the work isn't trying to do. The creative team will love you for it.

06Section 6: The reference

Show, don't tell. Provide 2-3 examples of work that gets at what you mean. Not exact templates — references that demonstrate the tone, level of ambition, or quality bar you're targeting.

References are most useful when they're cross-category. "Make our B2B campaign feel like the Patagonia activism work" is more useful than "make it like our competitor's last campaign." The cross-category reference makes the team think, instead of copy.

Avoid references that constrain too tightly. The point is not for the creative team to recreate the reference. The point is to align on what "good" means before they start.

07Section 7: The process

How will decisions get made? Who has approval authority? What's the timeline? How many rounds of revision are expected? When are stakeholder reviews?

Most briefs leave this implicit, which means it gets renegotiated mid-project, which means deadlines slip and scope creeps. Specify the process upfront. The creative team can plan against it. The stakeholders can hold themselves to it.

Template

Copy this. Fill in the seven sections. The work it produces will be better than the work most briefs produce.

1. The problem. What problem is this work trying to solve? Be specific. One paragraph.

2. The audience. Who is this for? Describe behaviors, beliefs, and habits — not demographics. One paragraph or one persona.

3. The constraint. What's the single hardest constraint this work has to navigate?

4. The success metric. One number. If it moves, this work succeeded.

5. The non-goals. 3-5 things this work is NOT trying to do.

6. The reference. 2-3 examples that get at what "good" means here.

7. The process. Decision-makers, approval authority, timeline, review cadence.

If a brief takes more than two pages, you're over-explaining. If it takes fewer than seven sections, you're under-specifying. Two pages, seven sections, the right specificity in each one. That's the brief.

Common questions.

How long should a creative brief be?

Two pages or less. If it's longer, you're over-explaining. If it's shorter, you're under-specifying.

Should the brief specify the deliverables?

It should specify the problem and the audience. Let the creative team propose the deliverables. Specifying deliverables is solution-led, which produces lower-quality work.

How do I write a brief for an AI project?

Same seven sections. The problem section is critical — most AI projects fail because the brief specifies a solution ("build an AI agent") instead of a problem ("sales spends 60% of their time on research"). Get the problem right, the rest follows.

Who should write the brief?

The person closest to the business problem, with input from whoever will measure success. Not the creative team. Not the executive who delegated the project. The person who will own the outcome.