Once your agencies understand the wider context, you are ready to brief them on a specific communications project.

This illustration highlights the 6 areas you’ll need to include in your briefing. The target audience may be your brand’s broad target or it might be a subset of people for whom the advertised product or message has been tailored. The second box is what you need the audience to remember from the advertising. This could be a connection between the brand and a Category Entry Point, or it could be a fact, feature or benefit of the brand. It could simply be a strong feeling about the brand. Whatever impression you want to leave people with, keep it simple - no more than two ideas, preferably just one. The third  box is to specify which Distinctive Brand Assets must be featured in the content. The fourth and fifth boxes indicate potential KPIs for the advertising, including specific consumer behaviours and commercial outcomes expected from the campaign. The final box is relevant for multi-media campaigns.  It is to request that when the agency comes back with its creative ideas, it includes prototypes ads for a variety of media types so it’s easier to see if the advertising idea is rich and flexible enough to span different platforms.
 
Media and creative teams need to know many of the same things and need to collaborate well on a project, so it often makes sense to have a combined briefing session. The written briefs, however, will need to include additional details specific to the media and creative sides of the project.

With regard to timing, the response to the media brief is generally needed before issuing the formal creative, mainly because it’s easier to develop content once you know which media channels you need to create for. Also different media are likely to be used for different roles such as brand building, purchase activation or a combination of both, and this should influence the creative. Channel choice should be driven by the target audience and the commercial objectives rather than being dictated by the creative idea.