“A Springboard, Not a Straitjacket”: Kit Altin’s Guide to Creative Briefing
Every great creative idea is responding to a brief, but the act of writing that brief is in and of itself an art form. Chief strategy officer at creative agency The Gate London, Kit Altin, has written all sorts of briefs, from navigating “an incredibly personal, physically and emotionally intimate space” promoting vaginal moisturiser Replens (which won gold at last year’s APG Creative Strategy Awards), through to “literally the world's biggest stage and one of the world's biggest brands,” working on McDonald’s sponsorship of the London 2012 Olympics. Just about every brief that’s possible to write falls somewhere on a spectrum between those, she jokes.
Writing creative briefs is something of a vocation for Kit, in fact. It’s a craft that she’s been running masterclasses on for 10 years now, beginning with a D&AD course that she continues to lead. She also teaches for the IPA, APG and has recently returned from SXSW where she took her briefing masterclass to a new audience.
Although Kit’s a planner’s planner (I’ve seen strategists’ faces light up at the mere mention of her name), she began her advertising career as a copywriter. It’s a perspective that she holds on to. “Having been a creative makes me a better brief writer and brief deliverer,” she says. “And I think that's for two reasons. One is that words really matter. When I'm training people on briefs, I always say every single word has got to justify its existence on that brief. There are lots of things you can put alongside the brief – you can brief it with a big inspiration pack, watch a movie or play music, or deliver it in a hot air balloon over the Sahara if you want to, but at the end of the day, you're going to be dealing with a piece of paper. What [creatives] really want is a piece of paper that they can come back to. It's going to be their North Star. So the words really, really, really matter. Being able to write crisply, interestingly and humanly is really important.”
Experience as a creative also gives Kit an empathy that helps her deliver a brief. “Understanding what it's like to be given a brief, and what a bizarre process it is. You hand someone a piece of paper and you're hoping that some stuff from your head will go onto that paper and then into the other person's head and then creative ideas will come out. I really vividly remember the pressure of someone handing me a brief. It's exciting, but also having to come up with the idea, I hope that helps me understand more of what it's like.”
Of course, after a decade of teaching briefing, the creatives in Kit’s agency expect something special. “Whenever I deliver a brief the creatives are like, 'Let's see what the little miss brief teacher's come up with!' They're lovely and I'm absolutely joking. But there's always responsibility to do well and there's probably an extra one for me.”
But that 10 years of thinking about the process of assembling a good brief has changed how she does the job herself. “I'm always blown away by what people can do, the creativity that people come up with,” she says. “I put them in the most difficult situations, working with material that they’ve never worked with before, with people they've never worked with before, in a very short space of time. It's extraordinary. I find it so inspiring. It shows you that everybody's incredibly creative. I've taught people from all kinds of different organisations.The stuff they come up with definitely feeds what I can do and my idea of what can be done.”
Combining this with her years as a strategist, Kit’s learned a lot of lessons that make any brief better. One common mistake that planners make is to put too much in the brief. “You do not have to include everything just to prove you've done all your homework,” she says. “You're doing it for the best of intentions because you're not confident enough yet to leave stuff out, overstuffing out of zeal and wanting to do a good job. All that does is make the creatives spend loads of time reading stuff they don't need and getting bored. The point of a brief is to be brief. And that does take time, it does take confidence.”
Another pitfall that Kit knows she fell into early in her career was being overly prescriptive. “The great briefs find the balance between being directive and prescriptive. You don't want to tip over into being prescriptive, but there's got to be enough direction, otherwise why are we doing the brief? You can't just send them out wandering into the forest in the dark without a map.”
Kit’s third tip is to expect creativity from the creatives. “You write your brief, you spend absolutely ages on it and you really care about it. And then the work comes back, and it's a bit off brief,” she says. A lot of strategists freak out at that point. “With time and experience, you realise that's actually where the magic is. It's understanding that creatives write from a brief, they don't write to a brief. Those little words make a really big difference. When I realised that and loosened up a bit, the relationships with the creatives became a lot easier and a lot more fun. It really needs to be a springboard, not a straitjacket.”
She’s actually formalised this in her briefing process at The Gate now, where she’ll ask for two ideas that are at least broadly in the vicinity of the brief, but one that’s just “completely wild.”
Of course, sometimes a great brief sometimes contains the diamond in the rough of a campaign’s idea. Sometimes that diamond is already quite polished and strategists can start asking for you to endorse them for copywriting on LinkedIn.
As satisfying as that can be, Kit tries to avoid the temptation. “Generally speaking, your propositions should not sound like lines. I find this so hard,” she says. “I've literally spent years rowing back from making them sound too polished. But it's a really bad idea. They need to be just those few steps back.
“In messy reality, sometimes it doesn't go that way. And particularly if it's a pitch situation, or something else where it's high pressure and it's fast, sometimes you do just end up writing something and sometimes it does sound a bit like a line and sometimes it does end up as the line. And as long as everyone's happy with that, who cares? We had something that worked, and that's great. As a general rule, you should probably try not to write the line,” Kit says, through mock gritted teeth.
Although Kit has updated her training on brief writing to keep up to date with new tech and methodologies, the fundamentals have remained the same since she started in 2014. “Those core skills around things like how do you make your brief brief? How do you make your propositions inspiring? Those haven't changed. So while the context has changed massively [...] those principles are still true and people still seem to need them.”
It’s also the same misconceptions that Kit’s always trying to challenge through her advocacy for good brief writing. While great briefs combine logic and magic, she’s perpetually frustrated that the focus is always on the logical. “Briefs at their worst can be treated like an order form,” she says. “We are not ordering coffee; it's not 'I want a double venti latte with oat milk and hazelnut syrup'. It's gardening; we’re creating the conditions for creativity to thrive.”
This outlook has served Kit well in her strategy career. “I believe really, really passionately, that the brief (as indeed the whole strategic process) is a creative act,” she says. “And that's not to say that you have to be Oscar Wilde, or you have to deliver it through interpretive dance (unless you feel that's right). It doesn't have to be jazz hands. But [...] it's got to be rich and fertile and exciting and inspiring and make [the creatives] go 'Holy shit, are you sure we can go there?' It's just got to have some creativity in it somewhere. I don't mind where that is, you might have it all the way through the brief, you might have an amazing tone of voice, you might have brought your target audience to life in an amazing way, you might design an incredible briefing where we all sit down and watch a movie. I don't care what it is, but you've got to bring creativity too.”
She hopes that the stereotypes that make strategists out to be the advertising equivalent of Brains from ‘Thunderbirds’ are changing. Having said that, the parameters that a brief sets are crucial. Most creatives will say, 'Give me the freedom of a tight brief'. “And this is the paradox at the heart of great briefs,” she says. “They need to be super tight, but then within that space, you've got to make it rich and interesting for them. It is managing to do both of those sides. You need the rigour but you also need the creativity. You're setting someone else up for success. That's the whole point of a brief. Paving the way and making everything as easy as possible for them to come up with brilliant ideas.”
Teaching all of this in Austin last month was a new challenge and Kit admits she was nervous. “Although I've taught people all over the world, it's a different kind of gathering of people. I don't know if I've ever taught a group as diverse as that. People from so many different countries, so many different disciplines.” Add to that the boisterous tone of SXSW. “They were so noisy and chatty, a kind person who was attending had to give me a whistle, because I couldn't get them to be quiet. That was a good sign. For me, that was great because it means they were super into what they were doing.”
What’s fascinating is that this time it was distinctly not an advertising audience. Briefing isn’t just something that agency strategists do for agency creatives. “It's such a fundamental skill that still seems to be so essential. I've had people contact me afterwards, to say it was great and I can see that they're working for a pharma company or a tech company – all kinds of different people. But they all need to be able to inspire others to be creative. It's not just for the ad world.”
Kit’s nowhere near done spreading the word of good briefs. There’s so much progress to be made, so why would she stop? “Even five minutes at that stage will give you better creative work. It's insane to me sometimes how little love briefs and briefing get when it's literally the springboard for great ideas. It's extraordinary. There are lots of people who appreciate it, that's for sure. And I'm on a mission to try and get creative briefs the love they deserve.”
