The ‘All Fucks Given’ Approach To Planning

Writing creative briefs is really hard.

Mainly because nobody tells you how to do it, and you end up learning on the job through trial and error. Oh, and everyone you’ll meet along the way has an opinion, so it takes a long fucking time for you figure out your own point of view on the right approach. If you’re lucky, you’ll learn from some brilliant Planners and Creative Directors, who will help you craft your thinking to be as provocative and punchy as possible. Will Humphrey has written a really wonderful guide to writing creative briefs, which is well worth your time and sharing with everyone else in your Planning teams.

A lot of briefs include prompts on the kind of things you should be thinking about. Some of them are useful. Some are just word wank.

The problem I have with all of them, is they aren’t angry enough. Stick with me. As Martin Weigel pointed out in his presentation How To Not Fail, our greatest challenge in advertising is overcoming indifference. Our briefs (and perhaps our training) don’t exactly scream at us to be punchier or to cut back on our inevitable bullshit. They’re almost asking for more, not less. Some include word counts to engineer pithy thinking, but I don’t think that solves the overall problem.

What we need is a briefing template designed around forcing us to make sense, and to do so through a zero bullshit filter. So, I had a go at making one. I call it the All Fucks Given approach to Planning. The swearier, the better.

You can access the Google Slide version of it here. Feel free to make a copy, tweak it to your needs, just please don’t make it PG.