Creative brief template

What this is about

A creative brief is a contract about intent. Its fields look bureaucratic until you watch a project without them: the objective drifts mid-edit, a second decision-maker surfaces in round three, and the film ends up carrying four messages at half strength each. The brief prevents this by being uncomfortable early — forcing one measurable objective, one primary message, one named approver — while changing course still costs conversation instead of shooting days. It is the cheapest document of the entire production and routinely the most skipped.

A template is the starting point, not the goal: once it has been filled in by hand twice, it is worth asking whether the document should come out of the plan instead.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• An objective phrased as a change — what should viewers know, feel or do afterwards — precise enough that success is checkable
• An audience described by situation and need, not only demographics, because a film speaks to a moment more than to an age bracket
• One single-minded message with the discipline to park everything else in a lower section labeled secondary
• Mandatories listed exhaustively — logo rules, claim, legal lines, brand colors — since each late mandatory is a re-edit
• The named decision-maker, the deadline and the budget frame, so creative work aims at reality from the first draft

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Interrogate the objective until it names a change in the audience, not an activity of the company — a film is not a goal, it is a means.
2. Describe the audience in one honest paragraph: their situation, what they already believe, what stands between them and the desired action.
3. Choose the one message. Write the runners-up into a secondary field so stakeholders see them honored and parked.
4. Collect the mandatories from brand, legal and management now, in writing, before the first creative idea exists.
5. Name the single approver and the feedback path, and get that person to sign the brief itself.
6. Fix budget frame and deadline, then have client and production confirm the finished brief — from here on, changes are change requests.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Three messages in one film, each arriving at a third of its weight
• Writing the brief after the idea, as decoration for a decision already taken
• An approver who first appears in feedback round three, with opinions and authority

With TillyGen

The brief is TillyGen's raw material: its fields feed straight into shot list, storyboard and schedule, so the intent you wrote is the plan the crew shoots.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.