The brief that gets good short-form: six things we ask for.

Most brands treat the brief as paperwork before the work. In short-form it is the work. The feed gives a video three seconds to earn the next three, and a brief that cannot say what those seconds are for gets videos that fill them with nothing. So we ask for six things first.

A gap the industry has measured.

The BetterBriefs study (2021) asked more than 1,700 marketers and agency staff in over 70 countries the same questions and got two answers. 80% of marketers believed they wrote good briefs; 10% of agencies agreed. 78% thought their briefs gave clear strategic direction; 5% of agencies agreed. Respondents put the waste from poor briefs at a third of marketing budgets.

The follow-up BetterIdeas Project (2025, with the IPA and the WFA, 1,034 respondents in 54 countries) priced the consequence. Creative work now averages five rounds of rework before approval, up from three in the IPA's 2007 research. Only 15% of marketers said the brief is always used when work is judged; only 10% said ideas are evaluated against clearly defined criteria. The work is judged against something, and it is not the brief. That is where the rounds come from.

The six things.

First, the objective, and the single decision the video should move. Not awareness in general but what a viewer does next: save, search the name, walk into a dealer. Second, the audience and the market, language included, because a hook written for Warsaw does not survive literal translation into Riyadh; that is why we produce four languages natively. Third, the product truth, and the proof of it available on camera. System1's study with TikTok (2025) tested 887 short-form ads: those with the highest early brand recognition delivered 88% higher memory lift than the lowest. A logo is not a hook; a product doing something in the opening seconds is.

Fourth, the constraints: legal, brand and category rules. In spirits, cosmetics and finance the claims we may not make shape the claims we can; we would rather learn them from the brief than in round four. Fifth, what has been tried and what the data said. Not 'creators did not work for us' but the hook rate, watch time and click-through of the videos that failed; those numbers say which hypothesis is already dead. Sixth, what good looks like: the metric you will judge the batch on, and three reference videos you envy. One link settles an argument about tone faster than a page of adjectives.

Every round of rework is a question the brief should have answered.

A brief for a batch, not a film.

TikTok's own creative guidance for performance ads (updated June 2025) recommends 3-5 creatives per ad group and 3-5 ad groups per campaign, a hook inside six seconds, the proposition inside three, sound on, 9:16, and a refresh once delivery shows a consistent decline. Its Return on Influence report (January 2025) goes further: 5-7 creatives in a performance campaign can bring a 1.5x advantage, and weekly refreshes brought 10-12% higher conversions. The unit of work on the platform is not a video. It is a batch, and the batch gets replaced.

A film brief describes one shot list. A batch brief names the variables, hooks, angles, creators, against one product truth that does not move. We ship a first batch 5-10 working days after an approved brief, with 15-40 creators bookable inside a week. With six answers, that batch tests six hooks against one truth and the feed tells us which one to scale. Without them, it tests six guesses, and the data cannot tell a wrong hook from a wrong premise.

Where the brief stops.

A brief cannot substitute for a product truth that is not there. The same System1 research found creator ads earn 39% more attention than conventional brand ads, yet viewers identified the brand at roughly half the rate. Attention with nothing to attach to goes to the creator. A perfect brief for a weak product yields fluent videos of nothing; the six questions expose that in the first week rather than fix it.

Some of the best work we have made came from briefs that broke this format: a founder's voice note, one line from a dealer, a screenshot of a complaint. The template is a floor, not a ceiling. The six things are the questions we would ask on the first call anyway; answering them early buys the round of rework back.

The first step.

The template is one email away. Ask for it on the contact page, answer the six questions in any order, and we will come back with an assessment and a proposed first month. To see what those three seconds contain, start here.