One line

If the brief does not fit on one line, the team is about to build four different things, and every one of them will be defensible.

I have watched it happen enough times to predict it. The brief runs to three pages. It has objectives, plural. It has a primary audience and a secondary audience. It has "considerations". Everyone reads it, everyone nods, and everyone leaves the room with a slightly different picture of what is being made, because a three-page brief contains enough material for several pictures and each reader chose the one that suited their skill.

The designer builds toward the sentence about premium. The copywriter builds toward the sentence about warmth. The media planner builds toward the secondary audience because the primary one is expensive. The client, who wrote it, had a fourth thing in mind that was in none of the sentences and all of the meetings.

Four weeks later the work comes back, and it is four pieces of work wearing one campaign name, and the review is about which of them is right, which is a question the brief never answered because it never had to choose.

One line forces the choice up front, where it is cheap. "Make the Thursday lunch crowd choose us over the place next door." "Get mothers in Jeddah to trust us with the first order." A line like that can be wrong, and that is its virtue: it can be argued with before anything is built, instead of after.

Everything else in the brief is context. Useful, sometimes essential, never the instruction. The instruction is the line, and if it will not fit on one, the disagreement has been postponed to the most expensive possible moment.

The line comes first. If it will not come, nobody is ready to be briefed, including the person writing it.