Shabby client briefs are hampering agencies’ abilities to deliver effective PR
Kumar: “If you want better investment, write better briefs”
Clients looking for a better return on their investment in a PR agency need to learn how to write better briefs if they want their campaigns to succeed.
Speaking on the CommsCon 2016 panel A Happy Family: In-house Teams and Agency Partnerships, which addressed how in-house teams and their PR agencies can better work together, Shiva Kumar, head of communications for LinkedIn in Australia and New Zealand, said poor briefs from clients was a major challenge for agencies.
A former account lead at Edelman, Kumar told the conference he had seen many bad briefs from clients making the agency’s job of delivering more difficult.
Good piece, great PR work starts with a great brief. Also, the over-promising piece is the road to ruin.
Is blaming your client good PR?
That [Edited under Mumbrella’s moderation policy]
If clients were PR experts they wouldn’t need PR agencies… perhaps their learning could involve the PR agency educating clients on what they need from them and why.
If an agency believes I haven’t written a “good brief” that agency should have the confidence and the gravitas to point it out to me. If after, fully discussing strategy and consequent objectives – if indeed the agency believes those objectives are a corollary of my strategy – they should tell me if they don’t … if all of that was convincing, why wouldn’t I appoint such a useful agency? When I’ve worked at agencies, I’ve constructively criticised the brief, and in-house, I’d expect the same from agencies who wanted to win and renew business. Blaming the client’s brief after the fact is very poor form.
Working on the agency side, I believe a “good” brief needs to be honest and focused on the issues that actually will be dealt with. Many companies write briefs that paint a big picture of budget and requirements, and then turn around once the deal is signed and reduce project scope to a tiny fraction of the work outlined in the brief. It astounds me how often I see clients waste time and money planning and selecting based on a scope that is basically irrelevant.
Poor briefs are hardly surprising or infrequent. It’s our job as professionals to rescue the dull and inept by asking the right questions. At the very least: who, what, where, when, why how etc.
At least ‘shabby’ is an improvement on ‘outright crap’.