Why Should They Care?
Briefs and Briefings in the Digital Age
An Ogilvy Red Paper about the addition of a single question to the DO brief: Why should they care?
The digital era has changed marketing. From push to pull. From paying our way to earning attention from our audience. To be achieved with valuable and dynamic content, social media and data.
This change strikes the heart of our business: the creative brief. The DO brief isn’t dismantled, we just add the question Why should they care?Resulting in creating places instead of filling spaces in a media plan.
How to create places given every other choice people have: Why should they choose to spend time with our content? In high interest categories (a minority) getting people to care may be easy. But most categories have to find ideas that are bigger than they are.
No matter what subject, it still has to connect to the brand. The link doesn’t have to be linear. Look at what many consider the first example of branded content: the Michelin Guide. By promoting restaurants and hotels, readers were encouraged to drive to these destinations, which led to the need for new tires.
The creative written brief is a means of capturing a conversation between strategists and creative people, yet it is not meant to reveal one definitive solution as The Answer. Instead, today briefing starts with a more fluid live brief process that sparks a creative exploration of a number of different hypotheses (this process is called Eight Ways In), from which one particular direction tends to generate more enthusiasm than others. The planner can kick start a live brief by delivering a ‘Plannerfesto’ to advance the process, and the live brief can take the form of an event.
