Core Concepts

Creating Briefs

Overview

What a Brief Is — and Why It Matters

A creator brief is the document that tells a creator what to make, why, and what "good" looks like.

It's where a campaign is won or lost. Get it right and creators deliver content that sounds like them and sells for you. Get it wrong — too vague or too controlling — and you get either off-message posts or stiff, scripted ads nobody watches.

A weak influencer brief costs you twice. First, in the content itself, generic talking points produce generic posts that get scrolled past.

Second, in rounds of revisions, when a creator guesses at what you want, you burn days going back and forth and the relationship sours. A tight brief front-loads that thinking, so the first cut is usually close.

💡 The deeper reason briefs matter: creators outperform brands because they sound authentic to their audience. The brief's job is to protect that authenticity while steering toward your goal. Over-script it and you strip out the exact thing you're paying for.

The Anatomy of a Good Brief

A good campaign brief answers five questions clearly:

Who the audience is and the specific problem they have.
What one idea must the content land as the single core message?
What the creator must include: required claims, disclosure (#ad), and the CTA.
What they're free to do their own way, the script, edit, and style are theirs.
What success looks like the goal the content is working toward.

The piece most briefs skip is the angle the creative hook, or the specific, scroll-stopping way the product enters the story (the problem it solves, the before/after, the surprising use case). The angle is the part that decides performance, and it gets its own topic in this phase.

Next up: The Do's and Don'ts — the concrete moves that make a brief land, and the ones that quietly kill reach.