What a brief should contain (and what we wish you would leave out)
Five things we need, one number most briefs hide, and why the deliverable list is the least useful page.
A good brief is five things: objective, audience, budget, what success looks like, and references with reasons. A weak brief is one thing: a deliverable list copied from last year. We read everything we are sent, then we critique it and send back a proposal. Half-formed ideas are genuinely welcome; recycled formats are the only thing that is hard to work with.
The five things we actually need
The objective, in business language. Not "a 60-second brand film". That is a deliverable, not an objective. "We are launching in a new market and nobody knows us" is an objective. The deliverable should be allowed to change if the objective is better served another way.
The audience, specifically. "Gen Z and millennials" covers two billion people. Who are you actually trying to move, where do they watch things, and what do they currently think of you? If the answer is "nothing at all", that is useful and worth saying.
The budget. The real one. The most common missing item, and the most expensive omission. Every creative decision is a budget decision worn differently; hiding the number means every idea in the proposal is shaped for the wrong constraints. You will get a better campaign from an honest S$40k than a padded proposal aimed at a number nobody confirmed.
What success looks like. Views, sign-ups, sell-through, internal approval from a specific person: any of these is fine. What we do with it: work backwards. The success metric decides what gets the money.
References, with reasons. Three links beat thirty. And the note that matters is what you like about each: the pacing, the casting, the colour, the feeling. A reference without a reason is a style lottery.
What to leave out
The prescribed shot list. The deliverable matrix copied from the last campaign. The format that worked in 2015 and has been resubmitted every year since. These do not make a brief safer; they make it pre-decided, and what they pre-decide is usually the spending pattern that made last year's campaign forgettable.
Expect us to question the deliverable list either way. Every line gets asked for its use case: where it will live, who will see it, what it does there. The lines with answers stay. The lines without answers become budget for the parts of the campaign the audience will actually notice.
If this is your first time commissioning
You do not need to know the vocabulary, the formats, or what anything costs. That is our half of the table. Come with the five things above, in an email, in bullet points, at whatever polish level exists. A paragraph and a number is a workable brief. We will digest it, critique it, and send back a proposal that tells you what we would make, why, and what it costs. From there it is a conversation, which is what a brief was supposed to start in the first place.
Shortest usable brief we can work from: what you are trying to achieve, who it is for, what you can spend, how you will judge it, one reference with a reason. Five sentences. Send it half-formed.
Questions we get asked
- What should a video production brief include?
- Five things: the business objective in plain language, the audience you actually want to move, the real budget range, what success looks like in numbers or behaviour, and references with a note on what specifically you like about each. Everything else is negotiable, including the deliverable list.
- Should I share my budget with an agency?
- Yes. Withholding it does not create leverage; it creates a proposal shaped for the wrong number. Any studio worth hiring will tell you what your figure can and cannot buy, and where they would concentrate it. That answer tells you more about the studio than any portfolio page.
- What if I only have a half-formed idea, not a brief?
- Send it anyway. A rough intention plus a real budget is more usable than a polished deck built on a recycled format. The digest-and-critique is part of the service.