Stop briefing campaigns and start briefing problems

By the time a campaign reaches an agency, a lot of good thinking has already happened. The commercial objective has been made clear, the audience has been identified, there could be research and insight as well as an agreed subject. And you can assume the marketing team has spent weeks building the internal case and getting stakeholders on board. But, somewhere in that process, it’s very easy for a business problem to become a marketing solution.

“We have expertise, but we’re not known for it” become a press campaign. “We need more of the right enquiries” becomes a paid campaign. “People still think of us as a business we were five years ago” becomes the next brand campaign. All of these might be the best response but, equally, they might not be. That’s where a good agency steps in and doesn’t take the solution in the brief at face value. It works to understand the thinking that got you there, then works backwards far enough to make sure everyone is solving the right problem.

If awareness is low, why? What’s stopping customers choosing that business? What do people currently believe about the business and what would you they like them to think instead? These conversations can feel like friction when you simply want it done, but it’s the creative process.

Looking beyond the brief

There’s a reason why brand awareness appears in so many marketing briefs. It matters and, in some cases, that really is the objective. But our experience shows it can also be hiding a more interesting problem. The business could already be well-known, but for the wrong thing. Enough people might know about the brand, but just aren’t making the purchase. Maybe the problem isn’t awareness at all; maybe it’s that competitors have given customers a clearer reason to go with them. If the problem can be articulated clearly, the creative brief becomes useful.

Instead of asking a team to make more people aware of the business, you can ask them to change something specific such as ‘make an established brand relevant to a younger buyer, give buyers a reason to reconsider their existing supplier, make an unfamiliar product feel less risky’ and so on. Now, you’ve given your agency a job. And, most importantly, the job can be connected back to growth.

Sometimes the brief is the barrier

There’s nothing wrong with knowing what you want from an agency, some of the best briefs are really detailed. The problem comes when the brief is focused on the thing that needs to be delivered and the reason for delivering it has disappeared. We need this, we need that. An agency can absolutely quote for those things and deliver them well but without understanding what has prompted the request, it can’t tell you whether they’re the best use of the budget. And, more importantly, it can’t bring everything it knows to the table and that’s a missed opportunity. A good agency should understand the objective behind the deliverable and a great one should be interested in what’s happening around it.

Marketing problems don’t live in the marketing department

Businesses aren’t a collection of neatly separated silos. So, when an agency is presented with a marketing problem, the cause (or answer) might sit somewhere else entirely. Take recruitment for example, a business struggling to attract talent might assume it needs a recruitment campaign. Maybe it does, but if employees are leaving quickly, Glassdoor reviews are bad or the reality of working there doesn’t match what’s being advertised, better or more creative isn’t going to solve the problem.

Or if a customer experience consistently contradicts the story you’re trying to tell publicly, a bigger PR campaign may amplify the problem rather than solve it. That’s why context matters.

You’re buying expertise from elsewhere

There’s a huge advantage of working with an agency, as over the course of a year its team might sit in boardrooms with businesses in finance, professional services, manufacturing, retail, technology and the third sector. It sees different operating models, sales processes, recruitment challenges, customer behaviours and approaches to growth. It doesn’t make the agency an HR consultant or ops specialist, but it does mean it can often recognise patterns.

It might have seen another firm solve a similar sales challenge differently. It might know that a supposed communications problem is actually being created much earlier in the customer journey. It can bring ideas from one sector into another precisely because it isn’t stuck in the same business every day. That’s part of the value of an external perspective. If the brief only asks for the thing, none of that knowledge gets used.

How do agencies connect creative with growth?

By understanding enough of the business to know what the marketing activity needs to change. The commercial goal might be revenue growth, market entry, retention or stronger position, which means the agency then needs to understand what is standing between the business and that goal, which audiences have an influence over , and what those people need to think, feel or do differently. Only then will the creative and solution make sense. Once this is in place, you can decide where PR, paid media, content, social, brand or digital (or a combination of them) is the right answer.

Measuring success can follow the same logic. If you want better outcomes, the campaign should look beyond channel-specific metrics and to whether it achieved the change required. That’s how creative becomes connected to growth because there is a clear rationale for every piece of activity and a line back to what the business is trying to achieve.

Our advice? Brief agencies well, tell them what you’ve already considered, give them the research, bring them into early discussions, share the challenges and tell them what you think the answer might be. But don’t just give them the deliverable, give them unfiltered access to the problem.