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A good brief tells the producer:
Eight points. One page. Done.
(If you want the reasoning behind each one with examples of how to do it right - and the bit about why most briefs aren't actually briefs at all - read on. If not, you've got what you came for.)
Most video briefs are bad. Not because the people writing them are bad - but because nobody ever taught them what a good one looks like. And the videographer, sat on the other side of the conversation, often doesn't ask for one. They take what they're given and crack on.
The result is a video that's technically delivered, broadly acceptable, and quietly fails to do anything for the business that commissioned it.
This post is about how to write a brief that doesn't end up there.
Read it before your next video project. Save it for the one after that. Send it to whoever in your team writes briefs on your behalf. It'll save everyone time. And it'll get you a much better video.
A brief isn't a wish list. It's not a shot list. It's not a creative direction document. (Those are all different things, and they come later.)
A brief is the document that tells the person making your video what success looks like, who it's for, and what it needs to do.
Get those three things right and the rest of the project becomes dramatically easier. Get them wrong - or skip them entirely - and you end up with a video that looks fine and achieves nothing. Zero. Zilch.
A good brief saves you money. It reduces revisions. It keeps the project on schedule. It produces a better end product.
The half-hour you spend writing one properly is the most valuable half-hour of the whole project. By some distance.
There are eight things every brief should answer. None of them are about cameras, locations or edit styles. We'll get to those.
Not the video objective. The business objective.
You don't actually want a video. You want more enquiries, better brand perception, a higher-converting homepage, a stronger pitch, a clearer recruitment message, or something else commercial. The video is the tool. Naming the tool isn't a brief. Naming the outcome is.
Weak: "We need a corporate video for our website."
Strong: "We want to increase enquiries from mid-market manufacturers. Our website currently converts visitors at a low rate and we think a clear hero video could fix that."
The second version tells me what we're actually trying to do. The first tells me you've ticked "commission video" off a list.
Be specific. "Customers" isn't an audience. "Mid-market manufacturers in the North West whose operations director is researching new suppliers" is an audience.
The more specific you can be about who's going to watch this, the better every other decision becomes - tone, length, language, where it lives, what it needs to say.
Weak: "Our customers and prospects."
Strong: "Operations directors at North West manufacturers (50-500 staff) who are reviewing their current supplier. They're risk-averse, time-poor, and already sceptical of being sold to."
If you can name a job title and a frustration that person has, you've nailed it.
A video for your homepage is a different video to one for a sales pitch. A video for LinkedIn is a different video to one for YouTube. A video for a trade show booth is a different video to one for your investor deck.
Same footage, often. Different videos.
Weak: "It'll go on our website and social media."
Strong: "Primary home is the website homepage hero - needs to work muted and autoplay-friendly. We'll also cut a 30-second version for LinkedIn and a 15-second vertical for Instagram Reels. No paid media use planned."
Tell the producer where it's going. All of the places. Don't leave me guessing.
If a viewer watches the whole video and remembers exactly one thing - what is that one thing?
This is the hardest question on the list. Most clients want their video to communicate five things. Sometimes ten. The honest answer is that nobody remembers five things from a 90-second video. They remember one.
Weak: "Our heritage, our innovation, our people, our values, our quality, our customer service and our commitment to sustainability."
Strong: "We're the supplier you call when the cheap option has already let you down."
Decide what it is. Write it down. Everything else in the brief flows from this.
Get in touch? Visit a page? Sign up? Book a call? Share with a colleague? Believe something they didn't believe before they watched it?
Weak: "We want them to engage with the brand."
Strong: "Click the 'book a discovery call' button at the end of the video. That's the only action we care about. Everything in the video should be building toward that single click."
If the answer is "nothing specific" - fair enough, but be honest about it. A brand awareness video has a different structure to a conversion-focused one. The producer needs to know which they're making.
This is where most briefs get vague. "Professional but approachable" doesn't help anyone. Everybody wants professional but approachable.
Better: give the producer three or four reference points. Videos you've seen and liked. Brands whose tone you'd like to feel adjacent to. Words you do and don't want associated with your brand. The more specific you can be, the more accurately the finished video will land.
Weak: "Professional but warm. Modern. Not too corporate."
Strong: "We love the way [Brand X] talks to customers in their videos - direct, slightly dry, no fluff. We don't want anything that feels like a traditional corporate video - no swooping drone shots over the office building, no people in suits shaking hands."
The second one tells me exactly what to make. And - equally usefully - exactly what not to make.
Budget. Timeline. Stakeholders who need to approve. Location constraints. People who can or can't appear on camera. Anything else that's going to shape what's possible.
Don't hide the budget. (Yes, I know everyone says you should make the videographer tell you their price first. It's a game. Skip the game.) Tell the producer what you can spend. They'll tell you what's realistic at that level.
Same goes for timeline. If you need it ready in three weeks, say so up front. Some producers can do it. Some can't. Better to know now.
Six months after this video is live - how will you know if it worked?
More enquiries. Higher conversion rate. Better engagement on LinkedIn. A specific number of views. A measurable shift in how prospects describe you in sales calls. Whatever the metric is - name it.
Weak: "We want it to perform well and get good engagement."
Strong: "Success is a measurable uplift in homepage-to-enquiry conversion within 90 days of going live. Anything else is a bonus."
This question separates the briefs written by people who think of video as a deliverable from the ones written by people who think of it as an investment.
The second kind get better videos. Every time.
You don't need to specify the camera. You don't need to write a shot list. You don't need to direct the edit. You don't need to choose the music.
(If your videographer is good, they'll do all of that better than you would. If they're not - you have a bigger problem than the brief.)
You don't need to write five pages. A good brief fits comfortably on a single page. Two at the absolute maximum. If it's longer than that, you're probably writing a wish list, not a brief.
You don't need to use any particular template or format. A clear email is fine. Bullet points are fine. A page of plain prose is fine. The substance matters. The form doesn't.
Before you send your brief, read it back and ask yourself:
The best briefs are written collaboratively. You can absolutely write one yourself before you send it to a producer. But the strongest briefs I've worked with came out of a 30-minute conversation between client and producer - where I asked the right questions and the client gave the honest answers.
Either approach works. The trick is not skipping the brief stage entirely. Which - and this is the depressing bit - is what happens most of the time.
Don't be most of the time.
Working on a brief for an upcoming video project? Send it over - I'll give you honest feedback on it before we go any further. Or if you'd prefer, get in touch and we can build it together over a 30-minute call. Either way, the better the brief, the better the video.
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