Writing a creative brief used to be a thinking exercise. Last week Digiday suggested it has quietly become a typing one. Agency leaders at the Digiday Media Buying Summit said that client briefs are getting longer, glossier and emptier. The reason is that so many of them are now drafted by AI. One CEO estimated that around 85 per cent of the briefs her agency receives were written with AI tools. The documents run to ten pages, and yet nobody can find the point.
So this week I want to talk about writing a creative brief that a design team can actually use. Not a template, but a way of thinking about what a brief is for, what belongs in it, and where AI genuinely helps. If you commission branding, websites or campaigns, this is for you.
What the week’s news tells us about briefs
The Digiday piece, published on 5 November 2026, is worth reading in full: agencies find AI overuse is leading to brief bloat. The pattern it describes is consistent. Marketers paste a few notes into a chatbot and ask for a brief. Back comes a confident document full of frameworks, commercial objectives and economies of scale. It reads like strategy. Sadly, it is not.
One agency strategy lead in the article called it “a judgment problem”, and I think that is exactly right. The tool is not the problem. What has been skipped is the thinking, and a long document now hides the gap. Digiday also cites a Basis Technologies survey suggesting that more than half of marketers and agencies already use AI to build their briefs. In other words, this is no longer a fringe habit.
Why does an AI-written brief go wrong?
A brief is not a document. It is a decision, written down. Writing a creative brief yourself forces you to choose: which audience matters most, which problem comes first, what you are willing to give up. That discomfort is the valuable part. An AI draft removes the discomfort, and with it the decision.
Language models are also very good at producing plausible, general sentences. When your notes have gaps, the model fills them with the average of every marketing document it has ever read. The result sounds like everyone else’s brief, which is precisely the thing a brand cannot afford. We wrote recently about distinctive brand identity when AI makes polish cheap, and briefs suffer from the same inflation as visuals do.
Finally, a bloated brief costs everyone time, and any statistics in it now need checking, because models invent numbers with the same confidence they invent adjectives.
What goes into writing a creative brief that works?
At SOHO we like a brief that fits on one page and survives being read aloud. Here is the shape we find most useful, whether the project is a brand strategy for a deep-tech company or a website for a museum.
1. The problem, in one sentence
Not the deliverable, the problem. “Investors confuse us with a consultancy” is a brief. “We need a new website” is a shopping list.
2. Who it is for, and what they believe today
Name the one or two audiences that matter most. Then write down what they currently think of you. The gap between that and what you want them to think is the job.
3. What success looks like
Be honest about what you will measure and when. More qualified leads, shorter sales conversations, a successful funding round, better recruitment. If you cannot name a measure, say so.
4. Constraints and non-negotiables
Budget range, deadline, legal limits, systems you must keep, brand elements that cannot change. Agencies would rather know these on day one than on day forty.
5. What you have already tried, and what you dislike
Previous agencies, abandoned campaigns, competitors you admire or want to avoid. This is often the most revealing section, and AI cannot write it for you because it does not know.
6. Who decides, and how
Name the decision-makers and the dates they are available. More projects stall on approval than on ideas.
If you are briefing a website specifically, our checklist of things to tell us about your web design project covers the practical details, from content ownership to hosting.
How a small senior agency handles the brief
We rarely take a brief at face value, however well written. Instead, we treat it as the opening of a conversation. We read it closely, then write back a short summary of the problem in our own words. When the client recognises it, we are aligned. If they do not, we have just saved everyone a month.
For branding work, that conversation usually becomes a workshop. We described how this runs in from workshop to launch, our branding process. The workshop exists because the most important things in a brief are usually the things nobody has written down yet. Working with organisations as different as IMMA, Simudyne and the EIT Community has made that point many times over.
Three habits help in practice. First, ask “why” about every objective until you reach a business reason. Second, strike out any sentence that could appear in a competitor’s brief without changing a word. Third, agree the measure of success before anyone opens a design tool. None of this requires software. It requires a conversation and a pencil.
Can AI help when writing a creative brief?
Yes, as long as it is interrogating your thinking rather than replacing it. M&C Saatchi’s North American CEO, quoted by Digiday, described AI as a sparring partner, and that is the right role. Here is how we suggest using it.
- Ask it the hard questions. Paste your rough notes and ask what a sceptical strategist would challenge. Then answer those challenges yourself.
- Use it to cut, not to expand. Ask for the same brief in half the words. Then cut again.
- Check for the tells. If the draft is full of frameworks, synergies and “tie back to commercial objectives”, it has been padded. Remove every phrase you would not say aloud in a meeting.
- Never let it write the problem statement. That sentence is the one piece of thinking only you can do.
A simple test: if you cannot explain the brief to a colleague in sixty seconds, it is not finished. Length is not a sign of rigour. Clarity is.
Mistakes to avoid in a creative brief
The same few errors turn up whenever people are writing a creative brief in a hurry. Prescribing the solution instead of describing the problem. Listing every audience so that nobody is prioritised. Hiding the budget, which only makes the proposals less useful. Skipping the “what we dislike” section out of politeness. Lastly, sending the brief without reading it yourself, which is how a ten-page document leaves the building with nobody’s judgement in it.
Frequently asked questions
How long should a creative brief be?
One to two pages is enough for most branding and web projects. Anything longer is usually background that belongs in an appendix, or thinking that has not been finished yet.
Who should write the creative brief?
The person who owns the problem, usually a founder, CMO or marketing lead, should lead on writing a creative brief. Colleagues and agencies can add to it, but the core decisions belong to whoever is accountable for the outcome.
What is the difference between a creative brief and a design brief?
A creative brief sets out the business problem, audience and measure of success for any creative work. The design brief then adds the specifics for a particular deliverable, such as formats, technical constraints and content.
Let’s talk about your next brief
If you are writing a creative brief for brand or website work and would like a second pair of eyes before it goes out, we are happy to read it. Our brand strategy service usually starts exactly there. You can get in touch here, and bring the one-page version. We promise not to ask for ten.
