How to Use AI to Write a Better Creative Brief (and What Not to Automate)

Writing a brief for an agency? Have you thought about using AI to help?

How often do you write a creative brief for an agency? Whether you do it a lot, a little or are looking to do it for the first time, you’ve probably felt the pressure that comes with something that, on the surface, seems like a simple task: give the agency everything it needs to come up with the right creative solution.

Now there’s a new question that might be playing on your mind: ‘How do I use AI to write a creative brief?’ And also, ‘Should I?’ We have the answers.

The creative brief is always the key

The creative brief is a critical part of the end result:

• it defines what’s expected
• it helps to stop things going over time and budget
• it informs, focuses and inspires the creative work

That third point is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. It potentially encompasses background information, audience & market insights, competitor analysis… all kinds of seeds for creative thinking. But how much is enough, and how much is too much?

There’s good news: that’s exactly where AI can help you.

AI can help write parts of the brief

Clearly AI is now part of the conversation. Like anything shiny and new, there’s a temptation to use it for everything. Our advice? Don’t!

It’s a tool that’s brilliant at some things, and not well suited to others. When it comes to writing a brief, it can be fantastic at filtering and understanding data, and using that to surface trends and insights that we humans might miss. Tools like Notebook LM from Google are ideal for helping you organise, filter and present research that feeds into your project – the things that get the strategic and creative wheels turning.

Use AI to spot trends and reveal insights that go straight into the brief

When we work on a strategic or creative project at Something Familiar, we use AI to help us understand data more effectively. Everything we create is built on insight, not hunches. That insight comes through understanding the audience, where the market’s heading, global trends and countless other potential triggers.

The sheer amount of data can be staggering, so rather than try and wade through it all, we bring in Notebook LM to do that for us. It reads and understands all of the data we add to it for a particular project, then we can interrogate it to reveal the nuggets that’ll help us connect to a particular demographic, in a specific channel at a particular time (for example).

That’s exactly the same way AI can help you write your brief. And typically, being on the client side, you’ll have access to all the data you need to discover those trends and reveal the insights which become crucial information in the creative brief.

And on an ethical level, it’s good to know that the data put into Notebook LM isn’t used to train the AI. It’s simply siloed away, used for the specific project only. Your data will always be yours and yours alone.

Something Familiar’s creative brief template

Our own brief template confirms that there are plenty of sections that AI can help with.

For the AUDIENCE section, we’re looking for insights into the people you want to reach, and all the context around that. Perfect, that’s exactly what we’ve noted as a strength of AI. By using the data you’re likely to have, you’ll be able to present a succinct overview that ticks all of our boxes and makes us want to dive in.

By the way, when we talk about data, it doesn’t need to be pages and pages of spreadsheets. AI is perfectly able to read through interviews (and even listen to them in some cases), reports, notes and all kinds of documents, so don’t worry if your ‘data’ doesn’t actually look like data. Many AI tools can output their findings to suit you too – you can even ask it to create a podcast.

Your delve into your data might also surface some interesting information for the STRATEGY section of our template too. Perhaps your AI support has already identified how you can reach your objective, and why it’s important to do that now rather than later.

In the THINGS TO CONSIDER section, we have ‘key considerations, such as research/targeting etc.’ Again, here’s where your AI tool can take unwieldy data sets and turn them into short, sharp hooks that will really engage and inspire the agency. Who said AI can’t inspire?

AI changes a lot, but not everything

There are still plenty of nuts and bolts pieces of the brief that AI can’t help with. We’re mainly talking about the way your brand looks and sounds, and details about the project itself. Without these things, an agency won’t be able to do any work, let alone reach your objective:

• a budget (to set expectations for what will be produced)
• a deadline (again, to set expectations)
• brand guidelines and TOV
• what success looks like and how it will be measured
• any relevant previous work
• contact names

AI is not a creative shortcut in the long run

It’s clear that AI is a great way to help put together parts of a creative brief, but it can’t replace what we human beings bring to the table. AI doesn’t have creative curiosity, it doesn’t understand the human experience and it doesn’t necessarily have common sense! You should still sense-check everything.

AI is excellent for providing the logic, whilst we’re brilliant at the magic side of the equation.

So while it can be tempting to generate some AI visuals for your agency, that can be a double-edged sword. It may help to show what’s in your head, but it can also railroad the creative thinking of a mercurial team. Perhaps what’s in their head would blow your mind – and isn’t that what a creative agency is supposed to do?

Add AI to your toolkit

If you’re looking to write a creative brief for an agency, then use AI to present your research and data in a compelling way. Your agency will be much more excited by a selection of juicy insights that AI has identified, than just by the data itself. After all, you can always give them access to the data once they’re fully engaged.

And one final thought, there’s a real parallel here between AI prompts and creative briefs. For both, what you get back nearly always reflects the quality of what went in. Writing a creative brief for an agency (using AI or not) can be tough, but it’s worth the effort for the best results.

Have a creative brief? Want help putting one together?

Let’s talk.

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