Writing a brief agencies will actually read

A long request for proposal does not signal seriousness. It signals that nobody in the building wanted to decide. The document goes to five shops. A junior is assigned to “get something in”. The useful people glance at page one, see no budget and a list of seventeen “must-haves”, and write you down as unpaid strategy.

Agencies do read briefs. They read them the way you read a proposal: for the commercial facts, the trapdoors, and whether the writer knows what they want. The rest is skimmed. If you are in the middle of choosing an agency, the brief is the one document you control. Write it so a busy account director can brief a specialist in ten minutes without inventing your business.

A brief is a decision document

It is not a brand book, a therapy session, or a procurement portal with extra adjectives. It has one job: to let a shop decide whether they can do the work, at what fee, with which people, by when. If a paragraph does not help that decision, cut it.

The reader on their side is a person who has to say yes or no to a pitch that will cost them real labour. They will ask three questions whether you answer them or not: what is the money, what is the date, and how ugly is the politics. Answer those on page one. Strategy and the history of the logo can wait.

A brief that hides the decision — “we are exploring options across the funnel” — produces options across the funnel. That is a mood, not a marketplace.

What belongs on page one

Put the facts a stranger needs before they open a second tab.

• The organisation, in a sentence a neighbour would understand. Not the mission. The trade.
• The job, in one sentence that names an outcome. Revenue, pipeline, retention, cost, or a launch that has a date.
• The audience you already sell to, and the one you do not reach. Skip personas with names like “Busy Belinda” unless you have evidence she exists.
• The channels you believe are in scope, and the ones that are not. If paid social is off the table because the founder hates it, say so. A shop that pretends otherwise is selling past you.
• The commercial envelope: fee range, media range, production, and whether figures are GST-inclusive.
• The calendar: when you need a response, when you will decide, when work must start, and any hard external date — a catalogue drop, a funding announcement, a regulatory change.
• Who decides, and who only advises. Agencies waste weeks charming the wrong person.

That is enough for a first page. If your first page is a mood board and a quote from the CEO, you have written a leave-behind, not a brief.

Tell them the money

Australian shops price from the constraint. If you withhold the number, they will invent one that fits their slideware: a $12,000 retainer because that is the smallest team they can roster, or a $40,000 “integrated” fee because the pitch needs a strategist.

A range is enough. “Retainer $6,000–$9,000 a month exclusive of GST; media $25,000 a month; production quoted separately.” That sentence does more work than three pages of “investment will be commensurate with ambition”. If you do not know the market, read what Australian agencies actually charge before you send anything, then put a range on the page anyway. A wrong range can be corrected. A secret cannot.

Say what the number must cover. Some marketers mean “everything including ads”. Some mean “labour only”. Media mark-ups, platform licences, stock, travel and GST are where quiet resentment lives. Write the inclusions you assume. Ask them to write the rest.

If the money is not approved, say that too. “This is a planning range; finance signs in the last week of June” is adult. “Assume a competitive budget” is how you collect three unusable quotes and a grudge.

Time, the financial year, and the calendar nobody writes down

Agencies plan labour in weeks. Clients plan in financial years. The collision is July, and then November.

If you need a shop live on 1 July, the brief has to leave your desk in April or early May. An EOFY briefing in the second week of June produces a contractor, not a team. January is a poor start date for anything that needs your people in the room. School holidays empty both diaries. Say these things. The shop already knows. They need to know that you know.

Campaign calendars belong in the brief as dates, not as themes. “Always-on with spikes” is not a calendar. “Two sale periods, a September launch, and no paid media in the week of the AGM” is.

Notice periods and lock-ins are not briefing poetry, but they shape the quote. If your procurement template still has a twelve-month term with a ninety-day notice, put that in writing. A shop that needs the lock-in to make the maths work should say so now, not in the MSA you will later read in how to read an agency proposal.

Constraints beat inspiration

The useful half of a brief is the list of things the agency must not break.

Legal and regulatory: who signs advertising claims, whether you sell in a category the ACCC watches, whether testimonials are allowed and how they are substantiated. Australian Consumer Law does not care that the caption performed. If you cannot prove the claim, do not brief it as an idea.

Privacy and lists: how you collected the email file, whether consent covers marketing, what sits in the CRM, and whether a shop is allowed to export it. The OAIC does not accept “the agency needed it for lookalikes” as a policy. ACMA still fines sloppy SMS. Write the consent story in plain English. Do not attach the database.

Brand and product: what is fixed (pack, offer, price, channel bans) and what is actually up for argument. If the website cannot be touched until a replatform in November, that is a constraint, not a footnote. If sales will override every lead scoring model, say so. The shop will price the politics whether you name it or not.

Access: who has the ad accounts, the CMS, the warehouse feed, the call-tracking login. A brief that assumes “you will be given everything in week one” is how onboarding eats month one.

Run a process you can compare

Three shops. The same document. The same due date. A page limit if you must — ten pages of response is plenty for a mid-market retainer. If a shop cannot think in ten pages, they will not think in the weekly meeting either.

Do not ask for speculative campaigns unless you are paying for them. Unpaid creative is not a test of talent. It is a test of who can afford to gamble. The shops that most need the work will over-invest. The shops you probably want will send a polite decline or a thin pastiche.

Ask for a working example instead: a comparable job, what they did, what moved, what they would not repeat. Ask who would sit on your account, by name and seniority, and what else those people already run. Ask how they will report against the outcome on page one of your brief, not against impressions.

If you already have a specialist and you are briefing a second shop, say so. Turf wars start in the silence between two scopes.

What to attach, and when to stop

Attach the things a stranger cannot guess: last year’s media numbers with method, a product list, a brand guide if it is short, a sample of the CRM fields, a screenshot of the broken form. Do not attach the 80-page brand book from 2019, five old RFPs, and a folder called “misc”. Nobody reads the folder called “misc”.

Stop writing when you catch yourself explaining marketing to a marketer. If a paragraph begins “as you will be aware”, delete it. If you are past 1,500 words, you are no longer briefing. You are rehearsing the job you have not hired for.

A single page of questions you want answered is worth more than another page of context. Number them. You will use the same list when the proposals come back.

After you press send

Answer clarifying questions in writing, to every shop, on the same day. A private phone call with the charming one is how you destroy the comparison you just built.

When the responses arrive, read them against your page-one facts, not against the quality of the typesetting. Then, and only then, give them a meeting. The brief has done its work if you can reject a beautiful deck in four minutes because it ignored the budget, the date, or the job.

If the process still produces three interchangeable answers, the brief was vague. That is on you. Rewrite the job sentence and try a smaller list. Scar tissue from a retainer you should have stopped earlier belongs in the next brief, including the exit conditions you now wish you had — see when and how to fire your agency.

Hide the budget and you will be quoted for the agency’s overhead, not for your job.

If you have run a hiring process from either side and can do it in Australian English without a capability reel, write for us.