Today, an "open brief" is usually just a vague brief. It is the byproduct of an author who simply didn't have the time or space to write a tight one, relying on the prevailing hope that leaving things open-ended might lead to a surprising outcome. But in a discipline under pressure from strict deliverables and KPIs, a surprise is rarely a good thing.
Wrapped in the constant anxiety of ROI and suffocated by tight deadlines, creatives handed a vague brief do not take wild swings. They play defensively. They spend their billed hours trying to guess what the client actually wants, meticulously generalising their ideas to ensure they hit a hidden target.
The truth is, a precise brief is the only thing that guarantees a "fit-for-purpose" result. But achieving that level of precision has become a logistical nightmare for modern marketing teams.
The administrative treasure hunt
Nobody wakes up in the morning wanting to write a bad brief. It happens because of the physical reality of the weekly calendar.
The modern brand manager operates in 30-minute windows between back-to-back calls, especially now that a quick Teams or Zoom meeting is so frictionless to schedule. In that frantic half-hour, they are forced to hunt down reference documents buried in messy shared drives. They have to interrogate product owners to extract critical context that was never written down, piecing together details from email/Teams threads and voice notes.
I remember trying to write a brief for a new service proposition early in my career in brand communication. Even then, before remote work became the norm, constant meetings stood in the way of deep work. Because it was an integrated offering, no single person held all the answers, forcing me to chase down marketing and product leads across various business units. That brief took me days to compile. At one point, someone actually suggested I just "make it the agency's problem". While that got the brief out quicker, it didn’t help get the campaign executed well.
Over the last dozen years in this industry, writing a thorough brief has become an administrative treasure hunt, something that surprisingly persists today despite our integrated channels and cloud storage. By the time the necessary information is finally gathered, the deadline has arrived, and a half-baked document is rushed out the door to the execution team. And you can guess how many meetings follow just for "clarity".
The broader macroeconomic environment makes this inefficiency even more costly. According to Gartner's recent CMO Spend Survey, average marketing budgets have dropped to an anaemic 7.7% of overall company revenue. In this “era of less,” marketing executives simply cannot afford the resource drain of administrative hunts and poorly directed campaigns.
Why standard AI falls short
I was quite excited when Large Language Models (LLMs) swept in, promising to save the day. Early on, the greatest value ChatGPT added was simply getting the brief started, overcoming the blank page and giving me more time to edit something robust.
Naturally, many of us have continued to throw off-the-shelf AI at the problem. It gives us the speed benefit, but the quality is inconsistent. You have to be a skilled prompter to generate consistently high-quality briefs out of a standard LLM.
The flaw is that standard models don’t actually know what a good agency brief looks like. They don't know what level of detail is required to execute work that actually hits your marketing goals.
The trained AI solution
You can train these models to create the right kind of brief, but it requires a few key ingredients: a massive collection of quality historical briefs, a prompt system you can test and continuously refine, and absolute certainty that the output aligns with a gold standard.
In hindsight, it feels like we were lucky to have all those ingredients when building Forge. By drawing on our agency roots, we had the critical volume of high-quality briefs needed to train the system. The sheer volume of work we produced brought us up to speed quickly on prompting, and our collective experience enabled us to program an algorithm that specifically scores the core components of a fit-for-purpose brief.
The result is a system that objectively knows what "good" looks like. This specialised platform transforms the briefing workflow:
- Synthesising raw inputs: This allows us to feed the platform messy notes from a meeting, a voice note from a client, or inspiration captured in a quick text, and watch it translate that raw input into a structured ‘quality-scored brief’.
- Targeted quality control: If your Overview is solid but your Target Audience or Key Message is lacking, the system flags them with a low-quality score, prompting you to generate the missing details with a click.
- Bypassing manual research: Additonally if you want to bypass synthesising background documents entirely, you can upload the extensive PDF of brand guidelines or the brand’s website address directly into a specific section.
- Shifting the workload: The AI extrapolates the required constraints, shifting the human task from staring at a blank page to executing expert correction. You are no longer drafting from scratch; you are editing.
No "open briefs," Just fit-for-purpose work
Recent McKinsey research estimates that generative AI could increase the productivity of the marketing function by 5 to 15 per cent of total global marketing spending. To capture that value, marketers must apply AI where it fundamentally alters the foundation of their work.
By letting a specialised AI handle the gruelling, low-value work of information gathering and formatting, we are not replacing the brand or marketing manager. We are giving them a platform that amplifies their capability and buys them the time they need for actual creativity and execution.
When the brief's foundation is rock-solid and logically sound, the creative team doesn't have to waste time figuring out the rules. They can spend all their energy asking the only question that matters: "What if?"
