Most video briefs are lying to you. Not on purpose. They just answer the wrong question.

Open the last brief that hit your inbox. Odds are it's logos, brand guidelines, product info, a messaging hierarchy, legal, mandatory claims, the CTAs, the deliverables, and a due date. All of that is real, and all of it is useful. But notice what's missing: anywhere in there, does it say what this video is actually supposed to do?

That's the whole problem. A brief like that isn't a brief, it's an order form. It tells us what to make. It tells us nothing about what it's for. And when we build off it anyway, here's what happens, and we've watched it happen a hundred times: the creative team solves the wrong problem, beautifully. You get a gorgeous video that doesn't move the thing you needed it to move.

We made a whole podcast episode about this, called Your Video Brief Is Lying. The fix is simple to say and hard to do: stop asking "what should we make," and start asking "what are we trying to do." Answer that, and every downstream decision, the concept, the casting, the pace, the platform, gets easier. Skip it, and no amount of polish saves you.

So here's what we actually do. On every project, no matter what brief we're handed, we look for five things before anyone opens a camera case. We call it the Savvy Framework.

1. Who, exactly, are we talking to?

This is number one for a reason. Get it right and the other four get easier. Get it wrong and everything downstream is aimed at a stranger.

And we don't mean "adults 35 to 54." We mean the actual person: what they watch, what they find funny, what they're struggling with, whether they even know they have the problem yet. A Gen Z buyer and a boomer aren't a different demographic line, they're a different video. Different pace, different humor, different everything.

Here's what that looks like in practice. We did a TV spot for a prostate-health product. The obvious version is a guy shuffling to the bathroom in his slippers, boring, and exactly what every competitor was already making. But once we really thought about who's watching, and who actually nudges that purchase, the idea flipped: we told the whole thing from the point of view of the dog who keeps getting woken up because his owner is up peeing every two minutes. Funnier. Stickier. Same product, completely different result, and it came straight out of question one.

2. Where is it going, and how long does it have to be?

A three-second Meta ad, an unskippable 30-second CTV spot, and a 45-second LinkedIn video are three different films, even with the same message. Distribution and duration aren't logistics you sort out at the end. They decide where the climax goes, how you structure it, the tone, the pace, whether you say the brand name in the first two seconds because half the audience just walked off to make popcorn.

3. What's the competitive context, really?

This one's our favorite, and almost everyone gets it wrong. If you're a drink brand, your competition is not "other drinks." A twenty-year-old buying an Olipop isn't only weighing it against other sodas. She's weighing it against the sweat-proof jewelry and the twenty other things fighting for the same limited money and attention. So the real question isn't "what are our competitors doing." It's what else is this person buying, watching, and being fed. Answer that, and you know how to stand out, how to be the one thing in that feed they actually stop for.

4. What do you love, and what do you hate?

References, both directions. The actual ads, tones, and looks the client responds to, plus whatever's already performed for the brand. And just as useful: what they can't stand, what feels off-brand, and where the line is that's too far. Knowing what you don't want to be points us just as fast as knowing what you do. This does two things: it saves three rounds of "not quite," and it narrows the playground. That sounds like a limit. It's the opposite. A blank, infinite blue ocean is where creative goes to die. Give us a defined space to play in and that's where the great ideas actually materialize.

5. How will we know if it worked?

The most basic one, and the one that's almost always skipped, or worse, never passed along to the people making the video. Leads? Clicks? Cost to acquire a customer? Making your other ads work harder? Define it up front, because if you don't, everyone just invents their own definition of success in post. And then you spend the money, publish the thing, and hope. You don't have to hope.

What happens when the brief actually answers these

When the brief answers all five, the work stops being a guess and starts being aimed. Two quick receipts.

Achieve came to us for a HELOC ad, genuinely hard to make anyone care about. But we asked the questions, and the answers were specific: not someone drowning, someone with mid-level stress who just wants to pay less and put the difference toward their kid's college. Probably the dad, probably Midwestern, and at that exact moment everyone was obsessed with AI. So the idea nearly wrote itself: a smart-aleck kid telling his dad to stop arguing and just do what the AI says, an AI that somehow knows a little too much about his bills and keeps nudging him toward a HELOC from Achieve. Low stakes, funny, and pointed at a real person with a real goal. It returned 4.8x on ad spend on connected TV, with a 27% lower cost to acquire a customer.

Plank & Beam wanted to move a featured furniture collection. The data said first-time buyers, couples who have to agree with each other. And buried in the kickoff, we found the thing that wasn't in the brief at all: they secretly wanted to be edgier, they just didn't know how. So we made the riskier idea. It became a new benchmark for the brand, drove half the featured collection's sales, and hit a 50% engaged session rate with an 8% add-to-cart rate, well above their norm.

Neither of those is a story about a prettier video. They're stories about a brief that answered the right questions first.

The takeaway

So if you're opening your laptop tomorrow to write a brief, here's the whole thing in one line: don't start with the deliverables. Start with the customer. If you know exactly who you're trying to sell to, everything else gets easier. Skip it, and you're forcing your creative team to make assumptions.

And assumptions are expensive.

Your brief isn't lying on purpose. It's just answering the wrong question. Change the question.

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This post came out of our Call Us Disruptors episode: Your Video Brief Is Lying.

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