How to write a brief for a TV ad

The quality of a TV advert is usually decided before anybody picks up a camera, because a clear brief leads to a clear idea, and a vague one leads to an advert that tries to say everything and ends up saying nothing. If you write briefs for a living, most of what makes a good one will already be familiar, so we’ll spend most of our time here on what’s different about television, which is the handful of things a production company needs to know that a brief for a website or a press campaign would never think to mention.

It doesn’t need to be a long document, and strictly speaking it doesn’t need to be a document at all. A page is plenty, and our own process starts with a conversation in which we ask the questions ourselves. Either way, these are the things we’ll want to understand.

The questions any good brief answers

The foundations are the same as for any piece of advertising. We’ll want to know who you’re trying to reach, described as one recognisable person (how old they are, where they live and what’s going on in their life when they need you) and not as “everybody”. We’ll ask what you’d like that person to do, which works best as a single action, since adverts that ask for three things generally get none of them. And we’ll ask why they should choose you, in terms that are true of you and not of the business down the road. If you’re not sure about that last one, your customers can usually tell you, and their answer is often not the one you’d expect.

The question that does most for a TV advert is what’s stopping people now. There’s usually a reason they haven’t come to you already, whether they haven’t heard of you, they assume you’re expensive, or they’re loyal to somebody else out of habit, and naming it gives the advert a job to do. When we made an advert for Joslin Rhodes, the obstacle was the picture most of us have of a financial adviser, a formal person having a formal conversation in a lifeless office. The firm had created a relaxed environment to put people at ease, so the advert shows their offices and lets people see what it’s like before they get in touch. George Bolam Foods, whose advert we made with the agency Dickinson Media, was famous in the North East for its meat, and what a lot of people didn’t realise was that it also had a bakery, a restaurant and a large selection of fresh fruit, vegetables and fish. In both cases the brief could be put in a sentence, and the idea followed from it.

The last of the familiar questions is what success would look like, with a number attached if you can manage it, such as enquiries a week, people at the open day or visits to the website. It gives everybody something to aim at, and it means you’ll be able to tell afterwards whether the advert worked (we’ve written separately about how to measure a campaign).

What a TV brief needs that others leave out

Where it will run, and for how long

On most other work, where the finished piece appears is a question for the media plan. On a TV advert it also changes the cost of making it, because the performers on screen, the voiceover and the music are normally licensed for an agreed length of time, an agreed area or size of audience, and an agreed list of uses. An advert that runs in one ITV region for three months is a different agreement from one that runs nationally for a year, and using the same footage on social media or in cinemas is different again. So tell us the areas you serve, how long you expect the campaign to run, and anywhere else you might want to use the advert, even if it’s only a possibility, because allowing for those at the start is far easier than going back to the performers and the composer afterwards.

If you already have a media buyer, or airtime that’s been booked, we’ll want to know that too, along with the lengths they’ve planned. Thirty seconds is the standard, but a campaign often uses shorter versions as well, and a twenty-second or ten-second version that’s planned before the shoot is much better than one cut down from the thirty as an afterthought. There’s more on that choice in our piece on how long a TV advert should be.

What you can prove

Every factual claim in a TV advert has to be supported by evidence before it’s approved for broadcast, so the brief is the right place to say what you can stand behind. If you’d like the advert to say you’re the area’s favourite, the cheapest or award-winning, tell us what that’s based on, and the same goes for offers and prices, with their dates and conditions, and for any wording your own regulator or compliance team insists on. We handle the approval itself, through Clearcast, but only you know what’s true of your business, and a script built around a claim that can’t be supported has to be rewritten at the worst possible moment. We’ve written more about where the lines are in what you can say in a TV ad.

The date, the budget and who decides

If the advert has to be on air by a particular day, because of a sale, an opening or the start of term, that date shapes everything that comes before it. When we made the launch advert for Haven Point with the agency Forward & Thinking, we had one week to get it filmed, cleared and on ITV in time for the official opening, which can be done, but only when everybody knows from the first conversation that it has to be.

We know people are sometimes reluctant to name a budget, in case the quote rises to meet it, but it’s the most useful single thing you can tell us. It decides what kind of advert is realistic, and it stops us coming back with something you love and can’t afford. A rough range is fine, and since there are two parts to it, the advert and the airtime, a good starting point for dividing it is the 80:20 rule.

We’ll also ask who needs to approve the advert and who has the final say. The best moment for everybody with a view to express it is the storyboard, when changing something means redrawing a frame, and the worst is the edit, which is one of the reasons we always start with a storyboard.

What to leave out

The one thing a brief is better without is the advert itself. It’s natural to arrive with a script in mind, or with a long list of points the advert has to mention, and both make the job harder. A brief that describes the problem, and what should be different afterwards, leaves room for an idea, and one that prescribes the answer doesn’t. If there are things that really must be in or out, such as brand guidelines, a line you always use or an approach that’s been tried before and didn’t work, list those separately, and keep the list as short as you honestly can.

A simple template

If a page of headings would help, these are the ones we’d use:

The business: what you do, in a sentence.
The audience: the one person we’re talking to.
The outcome: the one thing we want them to do.
The reason: why they should choose you.
The obstacle: what’s stopping them now.
The measure: how you’ll know it worked.
Where and for how long: areas, dates, the length of the campaign and any other uses, such as social media or cinema.
The proof: what you can evidence for any claims, offers or prices.
The budget: for production and for airtime, even as a rough range.
Must-haves: anything that has to be in or out, and who signs it off.

If you’d rather talk it through

Very few people can fill in all of those at the first attempt, and nobody needs to, because helping you work out the answers is part of what we do, and the conversation is often where the best ideas come from. To have that conversation, ask us for a free storyboard. We’ll sit down with you, ask the questions ourselves and come back with a storyboard that shows what your advert could look like. And if you’re sending the same brief to more than one company, we’ve also written about how to choose a TV ad production company. There’s also a separate piece on testing your message before you make the ad, for when there’s more than one way to tell the story.

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How to write a brief for a TV ad

The questions any good brief answers