You can usually tell within 2 pages whether a brief was written by someone who has talked to a customer. The ones that haven’t use a particular language. The audience is “time-poor professionals”. They “value authenticity”. They are “digitally native” and “seeking brands that share their values”.
None of those sentences are false. They’re just not about anyone.
I’ve sat in enough pitch rooms to know how this happens. A brand team is asked for a brief by Friday. The last customer research is 3 years old and was done for a different product. So the audience section gets written from memory, which means it gets written from the assumptions of the people in the room, and the people in the room are not the audience. They’re marketers in their thirties describing someone they imagine.
The agency then builds something for that imaginary person. The imaginary person loves it. The real ones don’t notice.
The 3 questions that find it
I don’t ask clients for research any more. I ask three things.
When did someone on this team last speak to a customer who wasn’t a complaint? What surprised you? And what does the customer call the product, in their own words, when they’re not talking to you?
If the third one gets a blank look, the brief has a hole in it, and no amount of creative will fill it. A campaign built on a made-up audience can still look good. It can win awards. What it can’t do is move the number the client actually cares about, because the person it was built to persuade doesn’t exist.
Why this is the expensive one
Media is where the money goes, so media is where the blame lands when nothing happens. And media is about to get stranger, with the checkout leaving your website and agents buying on people’s behalf, so the brief had better describe a real person. But by the time the campaign is live, the mistake is months old. It was made in a meeting room, with good intentions, by people who were too busy to go and ask.
Go and ask. It takes an afternoon. The alternative costs the media budget.