Creative Briefs in Advertising: a blessing and a curse. How creative briefs are used as faciliatory tools in the Dutch advertising industry.

The skill to harness creativity and put it to commercial use is what makes the media and creative industries so different from many different sectors. To further understand the creative process and the tools involved to making this generally ‘messy endeavour’ as efficient as possible, this thesis is an explorative study on the use of one such tools; the creative brief in the context of the Dutch advertising and branding industry. Following a literature review on the themes of defining the creative brief, recognizing the needs of creative producers and teamwork in innovation the author conducts interviews with a varied sample to represent the varied landscape of the Dutch advertising industry. Through a series of in-depth interviews and analysed documents, the following research question is answered: How are creative briefs used as faciliatory tools in the Dutch advertising industry amongst different stakeholders throughout the steps of advertisement and branding material production? Additionally, a further understanding of the development of a creative brief throughout the creative process is created. The research is based on the framework of the needs of creative producers by Perry-Smith & Mannucci (2017) and concludes that briefs complement the identified needs by ensuring validity, ensuring feasibility, offering guidance and providing inspiration. Additionally, while finding that every brief is uniquely tailored to the individuals involved their preferences, the author finds four overarching themes which can be found in every brief. These conclude that all briefs contribute to defining; the goal, the deliverables, the constraints and ‘good to know’ additional information. However, also conclude that dependent on the phase in which the brief is currently used, the specificity of this information is increasingly converged as based on the design principle of diand convergence (Roozenburg & Eekels, 1998). It is concluded that while not all creatives opt to make use of a creative brief (like) tool, there is no harm in doing so and in many cases the communicative qualities of the device can positively impact the creative process by mitigating the risk of the not invented here (NIH) syndrome (Baer, 2012). This however, is in large part because the often-considered negative influence of a brief: close proximity priming where closely related artifacts which need to inspire creatives are included in the brief (Brown, Bhadury, Bansal, & Bloxsome, 2020) is hardly done in the cases of the interviewed respondents and their analyzed briefs. Multiple future avenues around the ways in which creative briefs and the environment of creatives can be optimized for ‘better work’ are proposed as further research on the basis of these conclusions.