The perfect brief doesn't exist, here's how we work anyway

Every agency dreams of the perfect brief: clear objectives, a defined budget, a realistic timeline, a single available decision-maker. In reality, almost no brief arrives complete. That is not a problem to solve before starting, it is simply the normal starting point of any project.

In detail

Our first reaction to an incomplete brief is never worry, but a series of targeted questions. Who actually decides? What is the budget, even roughly? What would concrete success look like in six months? These questions usually fill most of the gaps in a single conversation.

When some areas remain unclear despite everything, we prefer to propose a clear hypothesis rather than wait for a precision that may never come. "We are assuming your priority audience is X, tell us if we are wrong" moves a project along far faster than an endless list of questions.

Timeline is often the most negotiated element, and the most misunderstood. A tight deadline is not necessarily a problem if it is flagged from the start: it changes how we work, but rarely the final quality, as long as scope is adjusted accordingly.

In the end, a well-managed imperfect brief often produces a better result than a supposedly perfect one followed without ever questioning it. Ongoing dialogue, more than the initial document, remains the real working tool.

A recent project started with a two-line message: "we want something for social media, not too expensive". Three exchanges later, the brand had a precise objective, a realistic budget and a workable timeline, without any of that information ever being formalised in a long document.

We still formalise something, at the end of every exchange: a very short written summary sent to the client, three or four lines recapping what was understood and decided. That summary, more than a detailed contract, prevents the vast majority of misunderstandings usually encountered mid-project.

What never changes, whatever state the initial brief is in, is the need to restate the final objective in the client's own words, not ours. An objective we cannot repeat in the client's exact terms is an objective we have not truly understood yet.

We have also learned to be wary of the opposite kind of brief, the one that looks too complete: twenty pages, contradictory objectives, unrealistic expectations stacked without any prioritisation. An overloaded brief often hides a decision that has not been made internally at the client's end yet, simply passed on to the agency as a list. In that case, our role involves helping the client settle their own priorities just as much as producing the work itself, a part of the job rarely mentioned but just as important as production.

Over time, we have come to see the brief less as a starting document than as an ongoing conversation, revisited at every key stage of the project. A short midpoint check-in helps confirm the direction taken still matches what the client had in mind, and allows early adjustment rather than discovering a disagreement at final delivery.

One last simple but effective habit: starting every kick-off meeting by asking the client what, in their view, would make the project fail. The answer, almost always more revealing than the list of objectives itself, helps anticipate friction points before they ever show up during production.

Even after years of experience, we still sometimes misread a brief that looked clear on paper. The difference today is how quickly we catch the gap: a fast back-and-forth early in the project rather than a costly correction right at the end. That speed of detection, more than the total absence of mistakes, is probably the real skill worth cultivating here.