How to brief a production house

What a brief needs

Three things make a brief useful: one objective, honest constraints, and room for the production company to think.

Everything else is context. A two-page brief that is clear about those three will get you a better idea and a more accurate number than a twenty-page deck that hedges on all of them.

A one-page template

• The objective. One sentence. What should this film make someone do or believe?
• The audience. Who, and what they currently think.
• The single message. If they remember one thing, what is it?
• Where it runs. Channels, placements and run times.
• Deliverables. Everything you need, including cutdowns, ratios and stills.
• Budget. A range is fine. A range is much better than nothing.
• Timing. Air date, and any fixed dates in between.
• Mandatories. Legal copy, brand rules, product shots, anything that must appear.
• What we are not sure about. The most useful section in the document.

Be specific about constraints

Withholding the budget does not get you a better price. It gets you a proposal scoped for the wrong job, which wastes a round for everyone.

The same goes for immovable dates, products that are not finished, approval chains with five people in them, and the thing your CEO does not like. A production company that knows the constraints designs around them. One that finds out later redesigns, and you pay for the redesign.

Common mistakes

• Briefing a solution instead of a problem. "We need a 60-second brand film" forecloses the answer. Say what it needs to achieve.
• Three objectives. A film with three messages communicates none of them.
• Reference films with no explanation. Say what you like about each one. Otherwise you will get the surface copied and the reason missed.
• No named decision-maker. If nobody owns the yes, the schedule belongs to whoever answers last.