# Marketing Campaign Brief > Writes a campaign brief that survives review — required fields, a single measurable primary objective, the audience-evidence check, and the named approval gate before any asset is produced. Use when someone asks to brief a campaign, launch, promotion, always-on channel push, or event marketing programme; trigger on 'write a campaign brief', 'brief the agency', 'we need a campaign for X', 'kick off the launch marketing'. Not for reviewing claims already written into copy (use marketing-claim-substantiation), not for organic search briefs (use marketing-seo-content-brief), and not for the product launch decision itself (use product-roadmap-communication). - Skill: `alihusains/marketing-campaign-brief` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add alihusains/marketing-campaign-brief` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/alihusains/marketing-campaign-brief/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Product & Planning - Author: alihusains (https://skillmd.com/u/alihusains) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/alihusains/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. | Field | What makes it valid | | --- | --- | | Business objective | One sentence tying the campaign to a commercial outcome someone already owns | | Primary metric | Exactly one, with a baseline and a target number. Not "awareness" | | Secondary metrics | At most three, explicitly labelled as diagnostic, not success criteria | | Audience | Defined by attribute and behaviour, with the evidence source named | | Insight | What we know about this audience that changes what we say. Sourced | | Proposition | The single thing the audience should take away | | Claims used | Every performance or comparative claim, each with its source (see step 5) | | Mandatories | Legal wording, disclaimers, risk warnings, accessibility requirements | | Channels | Each channel with its role: acquisition, nurture, or reminder | | Budget | Total, split by channel, with production separated from media | | Timings | Brief approval, asset delivery, live date, review date | | Approver | Named individual, per gate, not a team name | | What success does not mean | Outcomes explicitly out of scope for this campaign | ## 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.