Ad Creative Brief

Creative Brief

Write a performance-marketing creative brief: a per-concept test specification, not a brand brief with metrics bolted on. The classic agency brief centers on a single-minded proposition, is written once per campaign, and stays deliberately loose so it can inspire. The performance brief replaces that proposition with a falsifiable creative hypothesis, is written per concept per sprint, and is prescriptive about hooks, specs and decision thresholds because dozens of variants ship each cycle.

The stakes are documented. The BetterBriefs Project (IPA, 1,700+ marketers and agency staff, 70+ countries) found respondents estimate ~33% of marketing budget is wasted through poor briefing, and that 80% of marketers think they write good briefs while only 10% of agencies agree. Agencies name the gaps as focus (83%), clarity (79%) and inspiration (65%).

One honesty check frames everything else. Motion's 2026 analysis of $1.29B in Meta spend across 578,750 creatives found roughly 5% of creatives become winners - a hit rate no brief can repeal. So the brief's job is not to promise a winner; it is to maximise the quality, cleanliness and diversity of every at-bat.

This skill ends at the approved brief document, and never produces final creative. Writing the finished ad copy belongs to mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-copy-variants; the shot-by-shot creator script - spoken lines, shot list - belongs to mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ugc-ad-scripts. This brief writes hook _direction_, never hook scripts; that line is the boundary.

Hand off elsewhere too: scoring an existing video opening to mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-hook-analyzer, deciding a running ad is worn out to mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-creative-fatigue, sample-sizing and structuring the test itself to mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-creative-test-plan, and the targeting plan to mbfinotti/advertising-skills@ad-audience-targeting.

Interview

Ask before drafting anything. One question per message; offer multiple-choice answers where possible; skip anything already answered or visible in supplied material.

• Campaign goal, and the single primary KPI the creative will be judged on?
• Platform(s) and placements?
• B2B or B2C/DTC?
• Awareness level of the target audience: unaware / problem-aware / solution-aware / product-aware / most-aware? ("All audiences" is not an answer - it is the most common brief defect; press for one level per brief.)
• Who executes the brief: in-house designer, video editor, freelance UGC creator, or agency? (Changes how prescriptive to be, and whether rights and disclosure fields apply.)
• Production capacity, deadline, and revision cap? Is the deadline hard? (The format and testing-intent orderings below span hours to a week in time-to-effect, so they cannot be ranked without it.)
• Do you want the fastest at-bat available now, or learning that compounds across future briefs - a validated persona, a cleared proof asset, an owned footage library? (The first favours static and hook tests, the second favours video/UGC and persona tests.)
• Effort ceiling: who can be pulled in without asking permission, and can you get creator rights and claim approval at all? (A "no" deletes rungs rather than delaying them.)
• Brand mandatories and compliance constraints? (Regulated category? Which claims need substantiation before they may appear in a paid ad?)
• What evidence already exists: customer reviews, sales-call notes, ad comments, past winners with their metrics, competitor ads?
• Budget and expected deliverable count?
• Are platform auto-enhancements on or off - and does anyone actually know?

Brainstorm Before You Brief

Never jump from interview to a finished brief; the brief hardens assumptions, so surface them first.

1. Restate the campaign goal and the audience insight in one sentence each; get confirmation before proceeding.
2. Mine the evidence (methods in references/angle-frameworks.md) and shortlist the candidate pains/desires and personas.
3. Present 2-3 candidate concept directions - each with its messaging angle, the evidence it rides on, its format family, its trade-offs - and one recommendation with rationale. Ask narrowing questions one at a time.
4. Once a direction is picked (or blended), draft the brief section by section and validate each before moving on: context + audience, then message + hypothesis, then hooks + art direction, then the testing block.
5. Hold an explicit approval gate: no brief is final without sign-off. Log rejected directions in the angle bank - they are future tests, not waste.

Workflow

1. Run the Interview.
2. Gather evidence using the mining methods in references/angle-frameworks.md: scored review mining, top recurring 1-2 star objections, voice-of-customer beyond reviews (B2B: call notes, CRM comments, search terms), competitor ads filtered by longevity, past winners with their metrics. Every claim in the brief cites a source; a brief without evidence is a wish list.
3. Run the brainstorming mode above.
4. Fix the translation chain (below): pain → persona → messaging angle → awareness level → hook direction → format.
5. Write one brief per concept using references/brief-template.md, choosing the format variant (static / search / video-UGC, ranked in Format Variants below). Variations of a winning concept ride the original brief; only a genuinely distinct concept gets a new one. Target length: 1-2 pages including references.
6. Fill the testing-intent block and assign asset names via the naming convention - never leave naming to whoever uploads.
7. If you can browse the web, pull the platform's _currently published_ aspect ratios and safe zones for each target placement; otherwise write "preview in-placement before export" into the specs field. Published safe-zone numbers disagree by tens of pixels, so a hardcoded number is a defect either way.
8. Check the draft against the failure-modes table, then pass the messaging angle and hook option lines through your preferred humanizer skill - they must read as conversational human statements, not marketing copy.
9. Hand off. Run the revision loop: collect feedback in one consolidated round per revision (scattered piecemeal notes burn the revision cap), and send creative back if it addresses neither of the brief's top objections.
10. When results land, write the outcome into the brief's learning field and the angle bank. If your harness has persistent memory, memorize the angle bank, hook performance by trigger type, and per-concept outcomes so the next brief starts from history.

The Translation Chain

The intellectual core, and the part most briefs skip. Motion's Creative Strategy Engine is the named public methodology: Pain (or Desire) → Persona → Messaging Angle → Awareness level → Hook → Format.

• Pain is the default anchor; reserve desire for aspirational or luxury categories where no functional problem exists.
• Personas are secondary: different life contexts in which people feel the _same_ pain. Each pain × persona cell is a distinct messaging-angle opportunity.
• A messaging angle is a conversational human statement capturing the insight at that intersection - explicitly not a tagline or slogan.
• The angle stays constant across awareness levels; only its expression changes.

The named frameworks behind the chain - Eugene Schwartz's five levels of awareness (Breakthrough Advertising, 1966; Schwartz's own word was _levels_, not stages) and its neglected sibling, market sophistication - plus the pain × persona matrix and the awareness-to-hook mapping live in references/angle-frameworks.md.

Fixed Vocabulary