How to brief.
You’ve got the brief. The first move is getting brilliant work off it — from whoever makes the final thing, agency or in-house. This is the craft of briefing, then the anatomy of a Bampot brief — its ten sections, and how to make each one earn its place.
The brief is the whole game.
A brief is the smallest document with the largest leverage in the business. Get it right and everything downstream gets easier; get it wrong and no amount of talent, budget or AI rescues it. In the largest study of its kind — around 1,700 marketers and agencies across 60-plus countries — roughly a third of marketing spend was found to be wasted on poor briefs and the misdirected work they produce. And almost nobody can see it in their own briefs: four in five marketers rate their briefs as good; barely one in ten agencies agree. That gap doesn’t close by adding fields to a form. It closes by briefing better.
How to brief well
Not what goes on the page — how to work. A brief isn’t a handover; it’s the start of a collaboration. Eight principles for getting work you’re proud of.
The brief is a conversation, not a coversheet
The document is the residue of the thinking, not the thinking itself. The most common reason work misses isn’t a bad template — it’s that the real exchange never happened. Talk it through; hand the page over to confirm, not instead of.
Inspire, don’t just instruct
A brief’s job is to make someone want to do the work, not only tell them what to do. The fastest test: read it back to yourself — could you make the work from it, and would you want to? If it bores you, it will bore them.
Be single-minded
If everything is important, nothing is. The clue is in the name: a brief is brief. Choose the one thing and cut what doesn’t serve it — you can always say the rest out loud. A brief with five priorities has none.
Give the problem, not the solution
Hand over the question you need answered, not your guess at the answer. Constraints liberate: a sharp problem points creative energy somewhere; a finished answer just asks for compliance. The best people work from a brief, not to it — leave them room to beat your idea.
Separate the insight from the thought
The insight is what you notice — the human truth underneath. The thought is what you do about it. Keep them apart: collapse the two and you get a slogan with no foundation, or a truth with no instruction. A Bampot brief gives each its own section for exactly this reason.
Set the bar before the work starts
Agree what a good answer looks like — and how you’ll judge it — before anyone makes anything. Skip this and feedback later turns into opinion ping-pong. If you can’t say how you’ll measure success, you’re not ready to brief.
Make them play it back
A brief isn’t landed when you’ve sent it; it’s landed when they can tell you what you meant, in their words. Ask for the playback. And treat the brief as live — new information means a new brief, not a quiet drift.
Invite the pushback
A brief you can’t defend isn’t finished. Welcome the hard question — “what is this actually for?” — because the friction is where the real problem surfaces. The worst briefs are the ones nobody dared to challenge.
The anatomy of a Bampot brief
Every Bampot brief follows the same shape, whichever of the five it is — pack & design, research, marketing, culture or R&D. It opens with a one-line strapline that carries the mission, runs the ten sections below, and every field fills from your run — traceable back through the Provenance Map.
The situation
Why this, why now.
Orient fast — the commercial situation that makes this worth doing now, in two or three lines, not a category history. Lead with the tension: what’s changed, what’s at stake, why the clock is running.
Who this is for
The audience as an insight, not a demographic.
Make a real human appear, not a segment. Write the tension they’re living and the moment you meet them in — and name the moment that flips a fence-sitter.
The insight
The human truth underneath — and why it bites.
Distinct from the thought: the insight is what you notice; the thought is what you do about it. One real, slightly uncomfortable truth, its mechanism (why it matters now), and what would prove it wrong. It’s boxed in the brief because it carries everything after it.
The thought
The single springboard. One line.
The idea everything launches from. One sentence — provocative enough to argue with, open enough to spark a hundred executions. A paired thought is fine when the two halves are one move, not two agendas.
What the data says
The proof that grounds it.
The reason to believe — and in a Bampot brief this layer is searched, grounded and cited, kept visually distinct from the engine’s reasoning. Two or three sharp figures that size the prize and make the audience real, not a stat wall.
Reference points
The plays worth studying.
Precedents that prove the move is possible — each one protected a price or built a category by changing how it felt. Three or four named plays, each with the single reason it’s relevant. Borrow the mechanism, not the look.
What we need
The deliverables — specific about the ask, not the answer.
Define the job; don’t do it. List exactly what must exist and where it lives. Name the deliverable; leave the cracking to whoever makes it.
Mandatories & guardrails
The fence, not the field.
The non-negotiables that keep the work shippable. Separate true mandatories — legal lines, brand codes, proof-led claims — from taste dressed up as a rule. Each guardrail narrows the field, so add only what matters.
Practicalities
Budget, timeline, approvals, stakeholders.
The reality the idea has to survive. Honest money and time; who approves, in what order, and by when. Where something is genuinely open, the brief shows the slot — “to confirm” — rather than inventing it.
How we’ll judge it
The measure of a good answer.
The shared scorecard, agreed before the work — so feedback is a measurement, not a mood. The bar every route is held against, tied back to the mission in the strapline.
Before you send it.
Read the finished brief as if you were the one who had to make the work. If you couldn’t — or wouldn’t want to — it isn’t done. A brief that’s clear, single-minded and a little bit provocative does the hardest part of the job before anyone picks up a pen.