Core Concepts

Creating Briefs

What a Brief Is — and Why It Matters

The brief is the document you hand a creator that says 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 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 wanted, 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 brief answers five questions clearly:

Who the audience is — and the specific problem they have.
What one idea the content must land — 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.