The Brief Is Where Most Marketing Work Goes Wrong

The BetterBriefs Project, the largest global study on marketing briefs, surveyed over 1,700 marketers and agency staff across 70 countries. The headline finding was this: 80% of marketers believe they write good briefs. Only 10% of creative agencies agree.

The perception gap widens from there. 78% of marketers think their briefs provide clear strategic direction. Only 5% of agencies agree. 83% of marketers believe their briefs contain clear and concise language. Only 7% of agencies agree.

Nobody in these numbers is being dishonest. The marketer who wrote the brief and the specialist who received it are simply working with different definitions of what the brief was supposed to contain. The marketer describes what needs to be made. The specialist needed to know why, for whom, toward what outcome, and against what measure of success. That information was missing. The work that followed reflected its absence.

The Cost Is Not Hypothetical

Global advertising spend is projected to reach $1.07 trillion in 2025. The BetterBriefs research estimates that approximately one third of every marketing budget goes to waste due to poor briefs and misdirected work. At current spend levels, that is approximately $350 billion annually.

Gartner’s 2024 Marketing Technology Survey found that 56% of CMOs cite poor briefing and feedback loops as top barriers to marketing effectiveness. The brief is not a process inefficiency at the edges of marketing. It is the most common single point of failure in the commercial chain between strategy and output.

The mechanism is consistent. A brief that omits the business context produces work that is technically competent and strategically misaligned. A brief that describes the deliverable without describing the audience produces assets that suit the marketing team’s aesthetic preferences and communicate very little to the buyer they were meant to reach. A brief that specifies the channel without specifying the objective produces activity that fills that channel with content whose connection to business outcomes nobody can explain.

69% of marketers and 73% of agencies agree that rebriefs happen too often, leading to loss of time, money, and frustration on both sides. The rebrief is the cost that most organisations measure. The more significant cost (the work that was executed well against the wrong objective and never questioned) is the one that does not show up as a line item.

What the Brief Is For

Most briefs are written as task specifications. They describe what the output should look like with the implicit assumption that the strategy has already been agreed and the specialist’s job is to execute it.

This treats the brief as an administrative instrument when it is a strategic one. The brief is the document that translates commercial intent into creative and executional direction. Its purpose is to carry the reasoning that the specialist needs to make decisions when the marketer is not in the room. Which message takes priority when two compete? Which audience matters when the copy cannot simultaneously serve both? What does this work need to do at the business level, and how will anyone know whether it did?

The IPA made the same case at its 2025 Effectiveness Conference, where the message was direct: effectiveness begins before the brief. Get the thinking wrong at the start and every pound spent downstream amplifies the mistake.

This is the compounding problem that poor briefing creates. A weak brief does not produce one weak output. It produces a series of executions, across creative, copy, media, and channel, each of which was built on the same flawed foundation. The specialist who received the brief did not invent the misalignment. They faithfully executed an objective that was never clearly stated. The further downstream the work goes, the more expensive the original error becomes.

What Is Missing

The BetterBriefs research identifies the most common omissions with precision. The brief that arrives without a clearly articulated audience produces work aimed at no one in particular. The brief without a single measurable objective produces work that cannot be evaluated, because evaluation requires a prior agreement on what success looks like. The brief without strategic context produces work that is built on assumptions the specialist had to supply themselves, which may or may not match the assumptions the marketer was making.

90% of marketers and 92% of agencies agree that the brief is one of the most valuable and most neglected tools in marketing. Both sides agree it is essential. Both sides agree it is routinely underprioritised. The reason is not that briefing is considered unimportant. It is that briefing sits at the beginning of a process where the time pressure is already high, the strategic decisions feel settled, and the urgency is to move into production. The brief becomes the document that is written quickly to start the work, rather than the document written carefully to ensure the work is worth starting.

Teams with consistent briefing processes are 38% more likely to meet campaign KPIs and report 27% higher satisfaction among stakeholders. The correlation is not surprising. A clear brief produces aligned output. Aligned output requires fewer revision cycles. Fewer revision cycles mean the specialist’s time is spent on craft rather than correction. The downstream efficiency gain from a well-written brief is measurable at every stage of the production process.

The Strategic Document the Work Deserves

A brief that functions as a strategic instrument contains five things, and the order matters.

The business problem comes first. The commercial situation the organisation is trying to change, and why changing it matters. The audience description follows: a specific person in a specific context making a specific decision. The objective is stated as a single measurable outcome. The insight (what is known about this audience that makes this approach more likely to work than a generic one) provides the reasoning that allows the specialist to make judgements. The success measure closes it: one number, agreed in advance, against which the output will be evaluated.

Everything else is executional context. The channel, the format, the timeline, the technical specifications. These belong in the brief, but they are not the brief. A brief that contains only executional context is a task list. A brief that contains the five strategic elements is the document the work deserves.

The output of any marketing activity is a function of two things: the quality of the execution and the quality of the brief that preceded it. Most post-campaign reviews focus entirely on the first. The second is where most of the answer lives.

Sources: BetterBriefs Project Global Research Study 2021 (1,700 marketers and agency staff, 70 countries) · BetterIdeas Project Launch February 2025 · Gartner Marketing Technology Survey 2024 · HubSpot State of Marketing 2024 · IPA Effectiveness Conference 2025 · System1 and JCDecaux Creative Effectiveness Analysis 2025 · WARC Global Ad Spend Forecast 2025