#2: Mind Reading Is For Suckers
Our creative brief throws out the fluff and gets straight to the good stuff. So there’s no guessing. Only focus.
When you’re solving big brand problems in five days, you don’t have time to get lost in a 40-page deck. You can’t afford misalignment. And there’s zero room for the kind of vague marketing speak that sounds smart but leads nowhere.
Most agencies treat the creative brief like a compliance document: a rigid PDF passed down from strategy to creative with too many buzzwords and not nearly enough clarity. It’s often bloated with background, buried objectives, and brand truths that are anything but. And somehow, the most important question—what are we actually trying to make people do?—gets lost in the noise.
That’s not alignment. It’s mind reading. And it’s a waste of time.
Our entire model is built for agility, and our brief is no exception.
At Beers With Friends, we rewrote the format. Our brief isn’t a book report or a repository for all known information about the business problem. It’s a launch pad. We call it The Party Starter. Because it’s designed to kick things off, not slow things down.
We stripped it down to the essentials: a set of direct, plainly stated questions any marketer should be able to answer without digging through a brand bible. Who are you trying to reach? What do you want them to do? Why aren’t they doing it now? What’s the single most compelling reason they should?
Our brief isn’t about accumulating context. It’s about creating focus.
We also ask two questions that rarely show up in traditional briefs but make all the difference in a sprint:
What can you do? What can’t you do?
Because if we know your advantages and your constraints up front, we don’t waste time spinning ideas you can’t execute—or underselling the things that give you an unfair edge.
When you're sprinting through a five-day Beer Run, there’s no time to decode strategy decks or extract the “real” brief hidden in the attachments. You need everyone on the same page from day one. And that starts with a brief that actually briefs.
This format doesn’t just save time. It sets up better ideas. By forcing alignment at the outset and defining the creative runway early, we give teams a sharper starting point and a faster path to breakthrough thinking.
Agility isn’t just about moving fast. It’s about starting smart. That’s what our Party Starter is built to do.
