Assignment Briefing

An assignment brief is the document marketers use to give directions for the projects they want their agencies' and other partners to accomplish. The brief should identify your project needs, objectives, target audiences, budget, and timetable and provide relevant background information. The quality of your brief is the key to getting quality work done. Too often, however, the assignment brief is incomplete or simply not done. The goal of this course is to help those giving assignments gain an appreciation for the importance for why and how to draft complete briefing documents.

Today, depending on the company, one-to-many hundreds of individual marketers can interact with separate teams at different agencies on dozens of different assignment types. Regardless whether you are briefing your agencies for traditional advertising, digital direct response, social media, events, etc., the agency requires both the critical brand information, which may stay constant from one brief to another, as well as the tactical information specific to the project being managed.

The challenge is that the complexity of managing the information your agency ecosystem needs to operate efficiently has outstripped the capability of current processes to effectively deliver that information. The result, the costs stemming from the poor briefing processes is staggering.

In fact, research indicates that on average, 30% of an agencies effort is wasted due to poor briefing. While the loss may be considered marginal when compared to the revenue lost by off-brand, off-market, or off-message assignments, it is none the less significant.  More importantly, the friction caused by having to frequently send the agency back to "do the assignment over" keeps agencies and clients from becoming strong partners. 

Therefore, regardless of the revenue that could be gained by faster deliveries, higher quality creative, and more effective campaigns, marketers can pick up a quick 5% to 20% savings by directing agencies' efforts more precisely.

Participants in this course will develop a clear understanding of good briefing skills and processes, as well as an understanding of why initiatives like Integrated Marketing, Agency Consolidation, Lead Agency models, and Pay for Performance must start with good briefing if they are to be successful.

Who This Course Is For:

Marketers at all levels but especially those that will have specific interest including managers engaged in agency management or project briefing, brand managers responsible for agency financial management, marketing sourcing and procurement professionals as well as CMOs, Vice Presidents of Marketing and others responsible for strategic initiatives

Key Takeaways

• Learn how to gain rapid and lasting improvement in ROI from your agency spend.
• Understand how to brief your agencies so they can be as effective as possible.
• Learn the different information requirements for different agency assignment types.
• Learn how to make each piece of information complete, clear, and actionable by the agency.
• Learn how to capture insights, brilliance, and strategies alongside product and tactical information.
• Learn best practices for information flow through your company, partners, and agencies.

When

Where

Reed Smith LLP
10 S Wacker Dr
Chicago, IL 60606

Instructor: Deon Lewis

Deon Lewis has seasoned management experience of marketing budgets and personnel at the senior corporate level as well as managing global clients’ marketing strategies and tactics at agency senior management level. Has managed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of marketing spend and large teams of people with great success in his 25 years in the advertising and marketing industry.

Deon is co-founder of BriefLogic a category creating services company focused on tools and services used to order work from advertising agencies as well as establish standards and processes to facilitate the orders. Co-developed first standardized grading system of briefing quality. Co-led first industry audit leading to the establishment of industry standards for best practices in briefing. BriefLogic is headquartered in Austin, Texas.  He has been president of M3 Research, a firm focused on corporate enterprise marketing and sales messaging research and development.

Deon has also served as Chief Marketing Officer for Agel Enterprises where he led all marketing strategies for package goods company operating in more that 30 countries and which was expanding both products and markets by nearly 75 percent annually. He led the efforts to establish corporate brand as leader in its category, establish product line branding and brand standards, developed corporate policy for marketing budgeting to rein in spending to appropriate levels and developed strategies for product rollout and marketing support for new and existing markets.

Deon led the win and management of the McAfee business for McCann Worldgroup. Under his leadership the McAfee business grew nearly 200 percent for the agency. While at McCann he also co-led the Microsoft channel partner business as the operational lead, managing staff in both Seattle and Salt Lake offices.

Agenda

Defining "Brief"

• Understanding the brief as the marketers manufactured "product" you own
• "Raw Materials"
• The industry has become complex and fragmented
• Consequence/Cost - of extremely poor communication within the Communications field
• A "brief" is your assignment-by-assignment agreement for agency work.

How to give your agency the best possible chance of success

• Understand the agency perspective
• What motivates your agency
• The results of poor briefing on your agency

The "Universal Components" of brilliant agency briefs

• Understanding the fundamental building blocks of all campaigns and almost all agency assignments
• Top 10 components - Weighting the importance of each part of your brief

The types of tactical agency assignments

• Why one size definitely will NOT fit all your agency's requirements for success
• Each assignment type must have its own set of critical input
• You should MASTER yours , small projects vs. large projects

Team campaign briefing lab

• Develop a clear understanding about how briefs are built
• Develop a solid skill set on the component worked on during this exercise
• Recognize that mastery of each component takes practice