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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 our inbox is almost never the real brief. It is the surface expression of a deeper problem, need, or opportunity that the client has translated into the most familiar, manageable form: do this thing, by this date, for this budget.
Our job, the job we believe separates genuinely useful agencies from order-takers, is to find the brief behind the brief.
A hotel asks for a launch event. The brief behind the brief is: we need to establish ourselves as a cultural destination in a crowded market, and we have one chance to set the narrative.
A drinks brand asks for influencer coverage before summer. The brief behind the brief is: we are losing ground to newer brands in the on-premise and we need to rebuild credibility with the bartenders and media who shape category conversation.
A destination development asks for a PR programme. The brief behind the brief is: we have an extraordinary physical asset but no cultural identity, and we need to build one before the competition catches up.
In each case, executing the stated brief competently would produce acceptable work. Finding and executing the real brief produces transformative work.
Finding the real brief requires a different kind of conversation than most agency briefings. Not: what do you want, and when do you need it? But: what are you actually trying to achieve in the next two years? What does success look like beyond this campaign? What is the tension in your business right now that this brief is trying to resolve?
These are sometimes uncomfortable questions. Clients don't always have the answers. But the process of asking them — and listening carefully to what comes back — is where the most valuable brand strategy work begins.
Most agencies don't find the brief behind the brief because it requires them to potentially disagree with the client, propose something different from what was asked for, and take on the risk of being wrong about what the real problem is.
It is easier, commercially and psychologically, to take the brief as given, execute it professionally, and move on. The agency gets paid. The client gets what they asked for. Everyone is satisfied in a way that makes no one particularly better off.
We have built our practice on doing the harder thing. Not because it is more virtuous, but because it is the only way to produce work that genuinely matters.
