Develop a Creative Brief
A creative brief is a tool that provides the creative developers (i.e., advertising agency, script writers and graphic designers) with guidance on what the message needs to say to help them determine how the messages will be written and disseminated through mass media, community-based approaches, interpersonal or electronic channels. A clearly written creative brief will be better understood and lead to more effective messages than a vaguely written creative brief, which leads to confusion and poorly designed messages.
The creative brief summarizes the key information for the creative developers regarding the:
Intended audience
Desired behavior
Barriers preventing the behavior change
Benefits that outweigh the obstacles
Tone of the message and the media channels to use
Other creative considerations the team should know about
It is called a creative brief, so it should be brief. Creative developers are not interested in reading a 20-page document. Keep it to one page, or two at maximum. If you want to provide more background information about your SRH issue, you can provide a supplemental background document.
An important component of a creative brief is that it must highlight two important aspects:
1 Call to action: this is what you want your intended audience to do. For example ”use condoms every time,” ”call the helpline” or ”go to the Bright Star Clinic for more information.”
2 Key benefit: this is the benefit that your intended audience will get from doing what you want them to do. It needs to resonate with your key audience, not with you, your program or the community leaders where your program is running.
An example of a key benefit for a young person using condoms could be to ”stay healthy and achieve your dreams.” Telling them, however, that using a condom every time will keep their community healthy is not enough of a motivation for a young person.
Worksheet #12: Creative Brief will help highlight the important components of a creative brief and look for the call to action and key benefit for your intended audience.
