I'm often conscious that my musings on brands and stuff can easily get a bit abstract and un-useful. All this talk of polyphonic brands and the tyranny of the big idea is fine if you're coffeeing with a bunch of smarty-pants planners but not much use if you're trying to get a campaign for a hard-nosed tyre retailer out the door and still get home in time for your child's birthday. Or something.
Anyway.
One of the regular emails I get is - what creative brief template do you use? And of course being a smarty-pants planner I tend to say that I don't believe in a standard template and it just leads to form-filing and while that's sort of true, if asked to write a brief I probably know what boxes I'd have, and how to fill them in. And anyway, there are other people out there, probably in a planning department of one who'd just like some help in what should go on a good creative brief. So I thought maybe we should try a wisdom of the crowds thing and try to build the ultimate, all-purpose, ready for anything, use-it-until-you've-learned-to-do-without-it creative brief template.