Campaign Brief Template
Cross-functional brief that captures objective, audience, insight, single-minded proposition, deliverables, timeline, and success metric.
The campaign brief is the contract between whoever wants the campaign and whoever builds it. Its job is to end the campaign in the mind before any asset is made: one objective, one audience, one proposition, and one number that decides whether it worked. If the brief cannot be written, the campaign is not ready.
Reach for this when
- You are kicking off a launch, a seasonal push, an event, or a lead generation program.
- Work is being handed to designers, writers, an agency, or a media buyer.
- Stakeholders disagree about the point of the campaign and the disagreement keeps surfacing in reviews.
- You need a written record of what was agreed, so scope changes are visible rather than absorbed.
01. Objective and the one metric
What business result changes, by how much, by when. One primary metric. Secondary metrics may be listed but never negotiated against the primary.
- Objective in one sentence, expressed as a change in behaviour, not as an activity.
- Primary metric with baseline, target, and measurement window.
- Two secondary metrics at most, marked clearly as secondary.
- The counter metric you refuse to damage, such as unsubscribe rate, margin, or brand sentiment.
02. Audience
One primary audience. Campaigns aimed at everyone are aimed at nobody, and creative teams cannot write to a committee.
- Who they are, in one paragraph a stranger could picture.
- What they currently believe or do, which is the behaviour you intend to change.
- What they will believe or do after the campaign.
- Where you can reach them, listed as specific placements rather than channel categories.
- Audience size and the share you can realistically reach with this budget.
03. The insight
One human truth that makes the proposition land. This is the hardest field and the one most often filled with a restated feature. If it does not make someone in the room nod, keep working.
- Write it in the audience's voice, first person.
- Ground it in evidence: a support ticket theme, a sales call recording, a survey verbatim, a search query pattern.
- It should be uncomfortable or surprising. A comfortable insight is usually a description.
- Cite the source so a reviewer can check it.
04. Single minded proposition
One sentence the audience should walk away with. Not a tagline, not a list of benefits. If you find yourself writing and, split the campaign in two.
- One sentence, under fifteen words, in plain language.
- Three reasons to believe, ranked, each provable.
- The alternative you are being chosen over, including doing nothing.
- Mandatories: legal lines, disclaimers, and brand elements that must appear.
05. Deliverables and channels
Every asset named, sized, and owned. Vague deliverables are how a two week campaign becomes a six week campaign.
- Asset list with format, dimensions, quantity, and language versions.
- Channel plan with the role each channel plays: reach, conversion, or retention.
- Landing destination, including whether it is a new page or an existing one.
- Tracking requirements: UTM convention, conversion events, CRM fields to populate.
- What is explicitly out of scope.
06. Timeline, budget, and approvals
Dates that work backwards from the live date, a budget split by line, and the names of the people who can say yes.
- Live date, then brief, concept, draft, review, revision, and asset lock dates working backwards from it.
- Budget by line: media, production, tools, external partners.
- Approvers by name and stage. Two approvers per stage is the practical maximum.
- Review windows in business days, with the default stated: no response by the deadline is approval.
- Post campaign review date, booked at kickoff and never at the end.
How to use it
- Have the requester fill sections 01 to 03 before the kickoff meeting. If they cannot, the campaign is not ready and the meeting should be about strategy instead.
- Run a 45 minute kickoff to complete sections 04 to 06 with everyone who will do the work in the room.
- Circulate for written sign off. Verbal approval is not approval, because it cannot be referenced in week four.
- Freeze the brief at asset production. Changes after that point are new requests with new dates, and should be logged as such.
- Bring the brief to every review and read the proposition aloud before critiquing any work.
- At the post campaign review, score results against section 01 only, then write three lessons into the brief itself and archive it where the next brief writer will find it.
Common mistakes
- Listing three objectives so nobody has to lose an argument. The team then optimises for whichever is easiest to move.
- Filling the insight field with a product feature restated as a customer need. It reads fine and produces generic creative.
- Skipping the counter metric, which is how a campaign hits its number while damaging the list, the margin, or the brand.
- Letting the brief keep changing during production, so the campaign ships late and nobody can say what was actually tested.