Creativity, and the big questions

A good brief starts with defining the problem, says Giraffe Social's CEO and co-founder, Phil Treagus-Evans.

Imagine walking into your GP’s surgery and, before you’ve sat down, the doctor hands you an antibiotic prescription and then asks, “What seems to be the problem?” At the very least, you’re confused. More likely – you’re heading for the door. You wouldn’t trust them, and you shouldn’t.

Plenty of briefs open the same way. “We need six reels.” “Let’s do a TikTok series.”

A format is an answer. Before anyone picks one, someone has to define the audience’s problem.

What should the work change?

Three questions come first. Who are we trying to reach? What do we want them to know? What do we want them to do? Skip them, and the project becomes an effort to push the audience toward a decision already made.

If you hand agencies a brief targeting people over 60, one of them may dismiss using reels because “that age group isn’t on Instagram”; another insists they’re essential because everyone else uses them. Both are guessing about behaviour, because age only tells you how long someone has been alive.

Find the tension

It seems glaringly obvious, but I am baffled by how often brands don’t start by actually understanding who their audience is. Where do they spend their time online? What content do they actually consume? Don’t just make assumptions, or dust off the customer avatar an intern made seven years ago and go with that.

Do what most teams skip: talk with customers. I don’t mean with faceless surveys; I mean picking up the phone and having real conversations. Listen for the desires that draw them to your product or service, and the worries they desperately need to solve.

There’s a big difference between a question your audience is genuinely asking and a team’s guess about what might matter to them. One comes from properly listening; the other, as Matthew McConaughey’s character in The Wolf of Wall Street would say, “It's a whazy. It's a woozie. It's fairy dust. It doesn’t exist.”

What changed at Giraffe

We made this mistake ourselves. For years, Giraffe’s marketing led with what we could do and the work we’d made. All true, and all answering the wrong question.

Customers weren’t only asking, “Can this agency do good work?” They were also asking, “Is choosing them going to come back to bite me?”

Hiring an agency is a risk for whoever signs off on it. If it goes wrong, their name is on the decision. As the saying goes, ‘you don’t get sacked for hiring IBM’.

Try to understand those risks and concerns, then make sure the website answers them with small, subtle trust signals: awards, case studies, testimonials, research, expertise.

Don’t start with a new marketing format; start with what people need to feel confident picking your agency. Once you know that, you know what the content needs to say; then you can start to worry about how to present it.

Then choose the format

The right format often becomes clear from your audience’s question, where they spend time, and how they consume content. A complex question will likely need more than a short video clip; Instagram users seeking reassurance may prefer short videos from real customers.

Before the next brief

Before you write a list of deliverables, ask three things. Who is this for? What are they wrestling with? How do they prefer to engage with an answer? If you can’t answer all three, don’t write the prescription.