The traditional creative brief is a document of constraints: audience, problem, single-minded proposition, mandatories, deadline. It exists because the cost of producing creative work was high, and getting it wrong was expensive. Compress that cost by two orders of magnitude and the document starts to look strange.
When a team can produce twenty distinct creative directions in an afternoon, the bottleneck is no longer production — it’s the quality of the question being asked. We’ve started rewriting briefs as decision trees: a primary intent, followed by the explicit trade-offs the team is willing to make. Audience width versus emotional depth. Recognisability versus surprise. Speed versus craft.
This is not a defeat for strategists. It’s a promotion. The skill of articulating what you actually want — precisely enough that an intelligent system can riff on it — turns out to be exactly the skill that good strategy has always required. The brief survives. The format doesn’t.
If your briefs still end with “and a few options would be great,” you are leaving most of the value of these tools on the table. Specify the trade-offs.
Alex
