Marketing Campaign Brief

Campaign Brief Authoring

Purpose

Campaign briefs fail in two predictable ways: they carry three objectives so nothing can be measured, and they reach creative production before anyone with budget or compliance authority has signed. This skill fixes the field list, forces one primary metric, and puts the approval gate before asset production rather than after.

Prerequisites

• Inputs: the requesting stakeholder and their authority to spend; a budget figure or a stated range; the offer or product being promoted; the target start and end dates; whoever owns the approval gate in step 6.
• Access: prior campaign results for the same audience or channel, if any exist, from your analytics or campaign reporting system.
• Runtime: none. This produces a document, not a build.

If the budget owner or the primary metric is unknown, name the gap and stop. A brief written around a guessed objective is re-briefed, not amended.

Data classification

Internal by default. A brief containing unreleased pricing, unannounced product, or customer segment lists is Confidential — mark it and restrict distribution to named recipients. If a stakeholder pastes customer records, individual contact details, or account identifiers to illustrate a segment, flag it and do not carry them into the brief; describe the segment by its defining attributes instead.

Required fields

Every field below is mandatory. An empty field is a blocker, not a to-do.

Procedure

1. Establish the objective before anything else. Ask the requester what commercial number changes if this works. If the answer is a marketing activity ("more content"), keep asking until it is an outcome. If they name three outcomes, ask which one they would keep if the budget halved — that is the primary objective, and the rest become secondary.

2. Set the primary metric with a baseline. A target without a baseline cannot be evaluated. Retrieve the current value from the analytics or reporting system before writing a target. If no baseline exists, say so in the brief and label the campaign a benchmark run — do not invent a plausible starting number.

3. Define the audience against evidence. Write who they are, what they currently do, and where that is known from: research, product usage, CRM segmentation, or previous campaign performance. Name the source inline. An audience definition with no source is a persona, and personas do not target.

4. Write one proposition. Draft it, then test it by removing each clause; if the proposition survives, the clause was decoration. Multiple propositions mean multiple campaigns — split the brief.

5. Run the substantiation pass. List every performance, comparative, superlative, or outcome claim the campaign intends to make. Each needs a named source with a date and a scope. Unsourced claims are marked UNSOURCED in the brief and cannot be used in asset production. Do not soften an unsourced claim into a vaguer version of itself — that is the same claim with worse evidence. For anything beyond a short list, hand off to marketing-claim-substantiation.

6. Take the brief through the approval gate. All of the following sign before any asset is produced:

   Approver role	Approves	Blocks on
   Budget owner	Spend, channel split	Spend exceeding delegated authority
   Brand owner	Proposition, tone, identity use	Off-strategy proposition
   Legal or compliance	Claims, mandatories, disclaimers	Any UNSOURCED claim
   Channel owner	Feasibility, timings, inventory	Dates that cannot be delivered
   Data protection reviewer	Audience data source, consent basis	Targeting without a lawful basis

   Record each approval with a name and a date in the brief. A verbal approval that is not written down did not happen. If a gate is skipped for urgency, write the exemption and who authorised it into the brief itself.

7. Define the review point in advance. State the date the campaign is evaluated, who evaluates it, and what result would cause it to be stopped early. Agreeing the stop condition before launch is the only time it can be agreed honestly.

Failure modes

• Objective drift after approval. Any change to the primary metric restarts the gate in step 6. Treat it as a new brief, not a revision.
• Channel-first briefing. A request that arrives as "we need a video" is a format decision made before the objective. Walk it back to step 1.
• Aggregated targets. "Increase conversions 20%" across five channels hides which channel worked. Split the target per channel at brief stage.
• Undated evidence. Research older than the last significant product or market change is not current evidence. Mark its date and let the approver judge.
• Mandatories arriving late. Legal wording added after creative is built causes rework. Collect mandatories in step 6, not at asset review.

Boundaries

• Verifying and sourcing a body of existing claims or copy — use marketing-claim-substantiation.
• Briefing organic content for search demand — use marketing-seo-content-brief.
• Deciding what to launch and when — that is a product decision; see product-roadmap-communication.
• Writing the standing process by which briefs are approved in your organisation — use operations-sop-authoring.

Hand-offs

• Receives from: product-roadmap-communication (what is committed and therefore promotable), sales-discovery-preparation (objections heard in market that the proposition should answer).
• Routes to: marketing-claim-substantiation for the claim register, marketing-seo-content-brief where the campaign has an organic search component, operations-vendor-evaluation when agency or media partner selection is needed.