What the brief must contain
The core of a brief has not changed: an objective tied to a business result, a defined audience, a single-minded message and the reason to believe it. What has changed is the need for completeness below that. List the deliverables as formats with dimensions and lengths. List markets and languages. Name the mandatory elements: logo lock-up, legal lines, product SKUs, price or offer mechanics. Cite approved claims by their entry in the claims library rather than paraphrasing them. Set deadlines per deliverable and name the approver for each stage. Anything left implicit is decided by default and then repeated in every version.
References do the art direction
Adjectives such as premium, warm or bold mean something different to everyone who reads them, and to a model. References settle it. Include a small set of approved images for lighting, composition, casting and colour grade, drawn from the brand's reference library, and say what each is for: the light from this one, the framing from that. Add a few negative references labelled with what to avoid. Never use a competitor's or an artist's work as something to imitate; describe it instead if you need to explain what you do not want. Good references remove more revision rounds than any amount of explanatory text.
What must never change
The most useful section of an AI brief is often the shortest: the list of things that are fixed. Product geometry, pack text and colours. Logo artwork and clear space. Approved claims, word for word. Legal lines per market. Real people's likenesses, if any, and the limits of their consent. Price and offer terms. Separately, list what may vary, such as backgrounds, season, casting, props and copy length, so reviewers know which differences between versions are intended. The split protects the places where an error becomes a legal or commercial problem, and frees the places where variety is the whole point.
Briefs as structured data
When one brief feeds dozens of markets and formats, it works better as structured fields than as a slide deck. A form with required fields for objective, audience, deliverables, markets, claims, references, fixed elements and approvers can be checked for completeness before work starts, and every asset can be traced back to it. Prose still has a place, for the idea and the tone. In the studio, one brief produces images, video, audio and copy without prompts or model choice, and the brand hub supplies logo, colours, typography, tone and approved claims, so the brief can concentrate on what is new about this piece of work.
Updated 25 September 2026 · General information, not legal advice. Rules change, so check the current text with your legal team before relying on it.