A surprising amount of disappointing agency work traces back not to a bad agency, but to a brief that never actually said what "good" looked like. At Marketing Events Limited, we ask every new client the same blunt question before kicking off Email Marketing: what does success look like in ninety days, in a number, not a feeling?
Vague briefs produce vague output. "Make our brand feel more premium" gives a creative team nothing concrete to aim at or measure against. "Increase average order value by 15 percent among returning customers within a quarter" gives everyone — client and agency — something to actually be held accountable to.
The best briefs we receive include three things: a specific, measurable goal; the constraints that matter (budget, timeline, brand guardrails, regulatory limits); and examples of work the client has seen elsewhere that they do and don’t want to look like. That last part sounds obvious and is skipped constantly.
We also push clients to brief the failure case, not just the success case: what would make this campaign a clear miss, so everyone agrees in advance rather than arguing about it after the results come in. That single addition prevents most of the "well, it depends how you look at it" conversations that waste a monthly call.
None of this is unique to us — any competent agency benefits from a sharp brief. But we’ve found that walking new Marketing Events Limited clients through this process before Search Engine Optimization even launches saves both sides a genuinely painful first-quarter miscommunication.