As the Better Briefs Project will reveal this week, 90% of marketers fail to brief agencies effectively, and their failures begin with a total lack of strategy.
An interesting new piece of insight from the better briefs project was released yesterday, which was quite thought provoking.
Mark Ritson interpreted the results, and whilst I would concur that the briefing process can and should be improved (From both sides), the reasons that Ritson posed for the seeming gulf in perception between Marketers and Agencies are fundamentally flawed. Ritson offers the notion that Marketers are generally (90%) devoid of the ability to think strategically."The Better Briefs Project will finally lay bare the true horror of modern marketers and their inability to do even the most basic tasks associated with marketing strategy and briefing" Which I fundamentally disagree with.
Having sat on both sides of the fence there are challenges on both sides - agencies that fail to take on board the commercial context, and expected impact on KPI's. From a client perspective - I think it's lost on creative agencies just how little time a Marketer spends on ATL and creative. There simply isn't the time to spend sweating the vagaries, and nuance of the latest theories from Kahnmann in modern Marketing teams. As someone who's passionate about brands and creative that isn't right, and its of course no excuse for bad briefs - but it is important in the context of why a brief might be perceived as 'bad'. In my view it's no reasons to generalise that Marketers are all universally devoid of strategic nouse.
What it does highlight is the importance of being able to use a client lens to interpret briefs that come into your agency. To ensure that you are both speaking the same language, and you know what questions to ask when a brief might not be crystal clear - and you can only do that if you have the right lens.
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