The
account handler, then, has the job of turning the ad brief into
something the creatives can get their heads round. The final brief,
when it goes off to the creative team (or teams, depending on how
big the piece of work is, or how desperately the agency needs to
pull a decent piece of work out of the bag) will consist of answers
to a series of questions along these lines:
Who
are we talking to? (what's our target market)
What
are we saying? (what's the single-minded proposition we need
to communicate)
How
are we saying it? (what tone of voice should we use)
What
is required? (ie, 3 x press executions, 1 x 30' TV ad)
And so on...
The creatives
take it from here. What they have to do is come up with an idea
and turn it into a useable piece of creative: as already mentioned,
this could be a TV or radio script or scripts, press or poster
ads, or whatever. A creative team consists of an art director
and a copywriter (pictures and words... obvious when you think
about it) and, in reality, what they'll do is lounge around the
agency for a month playing table football, knocking off early
to go to the pub, and reading Creative Review, Dazed & Confused
and Sleazenation. Then they'll bash out any old nonsense the day
before their mock-ups and draft scripts are due and hope for the
best.
No,
not really. There are plenty of professional creative teams out
there that give a brief the attention it deserves and over-deliver
when it comes to first drafts. Plenty, without a doubt. No, really!
