I spent the best part of fifteen years writing creative briefs. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands if you count the internal ones, the tissue sessions, the pre-briefs for the briefs, the briefing documents about how to brief. The advertising industry has an almost religious devotion to the brief. It's the sacred text. The starting point. The document that aligns everyone, sets the direction, and ensures that what gets made is strategically sound and creatively inspiring.
And I'm here to tell you, from the other side, that the brief is dead. Not because it was never useful - it was. Not because strategy doesn't matter - it does, more than ever. The brief is dead because the world it was designed for no longer exists. It was built for an era when making things was expensive, slow, and required an army of specialists. An era when the gap between an idea and its execution was measured in months, not hours.
That era is over. And the people who killed it are the builders.
The brief was a translation layer
Here's what nobody in advertising wants to admit: the brief existed because thinkers and makers were different people. The strategist thought about the problem. The creative director thought about the solution. The designer made it look right. The developer made it work. The brief was the document that travelled between all these people, trying to carry the idea intact from one brain to the next without losing too much in translation.
Target audience. Insight. Proposition. Tone of voice. Mandatories. Every brief followed roughly the same format, and every brief attempted the same impossible task: to compress a complex human problem into a single page that would somehow inspire brilliant creative work. Sometimes it did. Most of the time, it became a political document - a thing designed to cover everyone's backs rather than to inspire anyone's imagination.
The best strategists I worked with knew this. They knew the brief wasn't really the point. The point was the conversation. The brief was just the excuse to have the conversation. But the industry built an entire process around the document, not the conversation, and that process became slower and more bloated with every passing year. Pre-brief meetings. Brief review meetings. Brief alignment sessions. Tissue sessions. Chemistry meetings. The bureaucracy of creativity.
What happens when you can just build
Something fundamental shifted when building became fast. Not just faster - fundamentally, qualitatively different. When I can go from a thought in my head to a working product with a URL in a single day, the entire logic of the brief collapses. Why would I spend three weeks writing a document describing what something might be, getting twelve people to approve it, then briefing a team to build it over eight weeks, when I can just... build it?
I've done this fourteen times now. Fourteen products, live on the internet, being used by real people. Not one of them started with a brief. Not one of them went through a formal approval process. Not one of them had a target audience section or a tone of voice slide. They started with a frustration, or an observation, or a conversation, and within days they existed in the world.
Modern Retro started because I thought it would be funny to see modern brands in 1970s shop fronts. There was no insight. There was no proposition. There was just a visual idea that I couldn't get out of my head, so I built it. First Out started because I was tired of not knowing where to stand on the tube platform. Forest Quiz started because my son wanted a game about Nottingham Forest players. None of these needed a brief. They needed building.
The brief assumed you couldn't test ideas quickly. It assumed that the cost of building the wrong thing was so high that you needed extensive upfront planning to reduce the risk. That logic made perfect sense when a television campaign cost half a million pounds and took six months to produce. It makes no sense when a working prototype costs nothing and takes a day.
Strategy still matters - the brief doesn't
I want to be clear about something, because I know how this sounds coming from a former Strategy Director. I'm not saying strategy is dead. Strategy is more important than ever. When anyone can build anything, the question of what to build and why becomes the only question that matters. That is strategy. That's the hard part. That's where taste and judgement and understanding of people come in.
What I'm saying is that the brief - the formal document, the process, the approval chain, the tissue session - is dead as a format. It is a relic. It served its purpose in a world where execution was expensive and slow. In a world where execution is cheap and fast, the brief is overhead. It is friction. It's the thing standing between the idea and the learning.
The new brief is the build itself. You have a hypothesis? Build it. Put it in front of people. See what happens. Learn something real. Then iterate. This isn't reckless - it is empirical. It's the scientific method applied to creative work. Hypothesis, experiment, observation, refinement. The old way was hypothesis, document, approval, document, meeting, approval, build, launch, post-mortem. By the time you learned anything, the world had moved on.
When you're both thinker and maker
The brief was a translation layer between thinkers and makers. But what happens when you're both? What happens when the person who understands the problem is also the person who can build the solution? The translation layer becomes unnecessary. You don't need to write down the insight for someone else to interpret. You don't need to describe the tone of voice for someone else to execute. You just make the thing.
This isn't unique to me. This is happening everywhere. Designers who code. Strategists who prototype. Product managers who build. The walls between thinking and making are coming down, and when they do, the documents that existed to bridge the gap lose their purpose. The brief is one of those documents.
I'm not nostalgic about this. I wrote good briefs. Some of them were genuinely inspiring. Some of them led to brilliant work. But the best work I ever saw always happened when the brief was treated as a starting point that was immediately abandoned, not a contract that was rigidly followed. The best creatives used the brief as a springboard, not a straitjacket. And now, the springboard can be a prototype instead of a document.
The advertising industry will keep writing briefs for a while yet. There are too many people whose jobs depend on the process, too many clients who feel reassured by the formality of it, too many agencies whose entire operating model is built around the brief-to-execution pipeline. But the best work is already happening outside that pipeline. It's happening in garages and bedrooms and on Saturday mornings, where someone with a problem and a tool goes straight from frustration to solution without stopping to write a forty-five-page document about it.
The brief is dead. Long live the build.
