Better Briefing: From Rushed Admin to Strategic Power Move

It's Time to Treat Briefing Like the Business-Critical Skill It Is

In marketing, some tasks are treated like vitamins - good for you, but in the grand scheme of rushed deadlines and last-minute urgencies… unimportant. Briefing has long been one of those. Something we all mean to do better. We know it's important… we know we should.. But it gets there eventually, right?

If we’re honest, briefing isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s not just a best-practice checklist. Like prompts for AI (which are nothing if not mini-briefs), the clarity of the input determines the quality of the output. Briefing is a business-critical tool, and ignoring it costs us more than we realise.

When briefing goes wrong, everyone feels it. Confused teams, wasted budgets, misaligned work, missed targets. The symptoms are universal. The fixes? Another pill. Usually short-term painkillers - extra meetings, leadership firefighting, delayed launches, and stressed teams. But the root problem? Still there.

A Persistent Capability Gap

Research continues to expose the scale of the issue:

• 90% of AAR client/agency assessments flag poor briefing as a recurring issue.
• Only 27% of marketers say their briefs are consistently clear and complete.
• 70% of in-house leaders call briefing a skill in urgent need of development.

Most marketers have never been properly trained in how to write a great brief, how to review, how to edit. You get the picture. And how to use the tools internally and externally - and of course, GenAI. A great tool - but only if you can write a good prompt (aka brief) properly to help.  

Most marketers learn by following what's gone before, with no shared standards, no clear expectations, and often, no feedback. It’s no surprise that briefs fall short - and the effects ripple far and wide. And yet without this - we enter the repetitive loop.  Waiting for the symptoms to flare up again on the next brief, or briefing cycle. Because poor briefing doesn’t just affect this brief, it's the repetitive issue that keeps on delivering pain.

This Isn’t Admin. It’s Leadership.

Briefing is not paperwork. It’s ignition.

It’s where strategy, creativity, and customer insight converge. It sets the tone, the ambition, and the direction for everything that follows. Done well, it sharpens focus, fuels energy, and builds trust between teams and agencies. Done poorly, it creates noise, confusion, and inertia.

Briefing isn’t a soft skill - it’s a strategic one. When you get it right, everything else moves faster, better, and with more impact.

Why the Cost of Bad Briefing Is Too High

Poor briefs aren’t just annoying, they’re damaging:

• They slow decision-making
• They trigger more rounds of feedback
• They waste precious time and money
• They dilute the commercial impact of marketing
  
  

As AI and automation speed up delivery, the brief becomes the human differentiator. The place where clarity, creativity, and customer focus must align. That’s not admin. That’s leadership.

Briefing is the New Creative Edge

Today’s marketing teams are under pressure to do more with less; more channels, more complexity, more demand. But the best teams aren’t just doing more. They’re doing less, better. And it all starts with a great brief.

A brilliant brief is:

• Clear on the customer problem
  
• Tied to a business opportunity
  
• Inspiring and actionable
  
• Aligned with what success looks like
  
  

This kind of clarity isn’t accidental - it comes from skill. And that skill needs to be trained, practised, and championed across the team.

Why Training Often Misses the Mark

Too often, companies try to fix briefing by asking their agencies to run a session. It sounds efficient, but when the trainer is also the recipient of the brief, it can reinforce bad habits. What’s needed is not just better formatting - it’s better thinking.

What works better?

• Independent, structured training
• Shared definitions of what “good” looks like
• Coaching that challenges assumptions, not just teaches templates
• Team-wide upskilling, not just senior exposure

The important part here is COMMUNICATION; sharing, challenging and ultimately changing at all levels.

The Payoff: Real Results

AAR regularly helps clients build capability in this space, and the results are hard to ignore. One recent programme transformed the way a national marketing team thought about their briefs. The result?

“We achieved 100% of submitted briefs being Right First Time last month, following two waves of AAR’s Better Briefing training. That’s amazing.

“The course shifted how our Marketing Managers think about customer focus and clarity, and energised our agencies too.

“We tracked impact from day one, with agency-supported feedback loops in place. The feedback on the upskill programme was as impressive 5/5 across the board.” — Financial Services, Marketing Lead – Operations, Planning and Performance

That’s not just creative success—it’s operational excellence, commercial clarity, and a massive boost to team confidence.

From Painkillers to Progress

If briefing is a known weakness in your marketing engine, 2025 is the year to fix it. Not with another patch, but with a structured, scalable shift in capability. Build the muscle. Don’t just manage the pain.

Start with the brief. It’s where all great work begins.

Explore AAR’s Better Briefing Upskill Programme, part of the Mini Marketing Excellence series, which also includes Better Evaluation, Better Critique, and Better Agency Management.

Want to chat? Drop Vicky a line at vgillan@aargroup.co.uk