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By Andy El-Bayeh, CEO of Example
The brief asked for an event. The opportunity was a brand.
This happens more often than clients realise and more often than agencies admit. The brief that arrives in the room is almost never the most important brief in the room. Behind it, sometimes hiding behind it, sometimes just not yet formed is a strategic question that matters more than anything in the document.
The agencies that produce genuinely distinctive work have learned to ask for both.
When a drinks brand briefs for an event activation, they are rarely just trying to run a good event. They are trying to do something for their brand, lift consideration among a specific audience, deepen association with a cultural territory, create content that travels after the activation is over.
The tactical brief has a clean deliverable: a great event, strong photography, earned coverage, a content package. Measurable. Manageable. Satisfying.
But if the event isn’t connected to a coherent brand strategy, if it exists in isolation from every other thing the brand is doing, the best it can do is produce good content. It can’t produce brand growth. It can’t shift the premium perception that drives long-term pricing power. It can’t compound.
We were working through our clients brand positioning ahead of a new activation push. The client’s brief was tight and tactical: what do we do around a big summer sporting event in Australia? Build something around presence and partnership visibility.
Fair brief. Sensible commercial logic. And the wrong question for where the brand actually needed to go.
The brand has an extraordinary heritage, a provenance story, craft credentials, the kind of brand DNA that their premium consumers respond to deeply. But like a lot of long-established brands, it had drifted toward the promotional circuit. None of it bad, exactly. But none of it building anything.
The conversation shifted when we pushed back on the brief itself. Not the budget, not the timeline. The brief.
What are we actually trying to do here? Is this event a one-off visibility play, or does it need to do work for the long-term brand?
Those are two different briefs and they require two different answers. The brands conversation ended with a better brief, one that kept the sporting event as the context but reframed what success actually looked like. That work produced +670% YoY growth and 408M+ earned reach.
Asking for the brief behind the brief requires something from both sides.
From the agency, it requires the confidence to have a conversation that might make the client uncomfortable. From the client, it requires an openness to being challenged.
The best work we’ve ever produced, the hotel launches that moved ADR, the drinks campaigns that drove genuine category share, came from those conversations where we asked what success actually looked like, and built backwards from there.
