/creative-brief

name: creative-brief
description: >-
  Grade, pressure-test, and write creative and campaign briefs against a real strategic
  standard (IIOB: Idea, Insight, Objective, Benefit). Use this whenever someone shares a
  brief, creative brief, campaign brief, content brief, or marketing brief and wants
  feedback, a score, a critique, or help making it stronger; whenever someone is stuck
  starting a brief and needs to be guided through one; or whenever someone asks whether a
  brief is good, why a brief feels weak or flat, or what is missing from it. It catches the
  most common and most expensive failure: a tidy, complete-looking brief that informs but
  does not move the people who have to make the work, an observation dressed up as an
  insight, a missing problem reframe, or the absence of tension. It interrogates like a
  senior creative strategist instead of filling in a template. Use it even when the user
  only says "is this brief any good?" or pastes a brief with no explicit instruction. It
  also covers social and platform briefs: use it whenever someone needs a social brief, a
  TikTok / Reels / Shorts / UGC brief, scroll-stopping hooks, a hook matrix, or
  performance-driven creative for social, where a hook is treated as a tension resolved in
  the first one to three seconds.

Creative Brief

Grade briefs, pressure-test them, or build one from scratch through questioning. The job is never to produce a *complete* brief. It is to produce a brief that **moves the person who has to make the work.**

Why this exists

Most briefs are a careful pile of everything known about the business. At best that is a tidy summary. At worst it is a brain dump with a logo on it. Either way it walks the reader from A to B and never once moves them, so the work built on top of it comes out flat. Every team downstream is about to spend weeks solving whatever problem sits at the top of the brief. If that problem is wrong, or boring, or unowned, all the talent in the building is aimed at the wrong target.

A brief that works does four things, and a model writing on autopilot does none of them by default. It **reframes the problem** instead of accepting the one it was handed. It carries a **real insight** instead of an observation. It finds a **real tension** and resolves it in a way that is true to the brand, rather than leaving the work with nothing to push for or against. And it states an **idea** so clear a stranger could act on it. This skill exists to enforce those four things, because they are exactly what gets skipped.

Two modes

Read the situation and pick. Do not announce the mode mechanically; just operate in it.

• **GRADE** (the default whenever a brief already exists). The user pastes or attaches a brief, or describes one, or asks "is this good / what's missing / why does this feel off." Score it, find where it goes lifeless, and hand back the hard questions it cannot yet answer.
• **BUILD** (whenever no brief exists yet, or the user is stuck at a blank page). Do not write a brief *for* them from a single prompt. Interview them toward one, the way a senior strategist would, pushing on weak answers until the brief earns itself.

If the user pastes a brief *and* asks for help improving it, grade first, then offer to rebuild the weak sections through BUILD-style questioning.

Both modes have a **standard** layer (campaign and brand briefs) and a **social** layer (platform-native, hook-driven briefs for TikTok, Reels, Shorts, UGC, and performance creative). The actions are the same; the social layer adds platform reality and turns the idea into hooks. When the request is about social, platforms, or hooks, read `references/social.md` and follow the social section below.

The standard: IIOB

Every brief, written or graded, is judged on four things. These are the spine. Full pass/weak/missing criteria and worked examples live in `references/standard.md` — **read that file before grading or building**, because the difference between a pass and a fail on each dimension is specific and easy to wave through.

• **Idea** — a single clear thing we want a person to *think, feel, or do*. Not a description of the campaign. If you cannot say it in one sentence a stranger could act on, it is not there yet.
• **Insight** — a real tension seen from the *audience's* side, not the brand's. The test is "people think X, but actually Y," and it has to surprise you a little even though you already knew both halves. Most things labelled "insight" are observations. Catching that is half the value of this skill.
• **Objective** — honest about what we are actually building: emotional relevance, plain awareness, or preference. A brief that secretly wants all three usually achieves none.
• **Benefit** — a clear reason *this* person should care at all. If the benefit is really a feature list, the brief is decoration.

If one of the four is missing, the work the brief produces will be decoration too. Say so plainly.

The four moves

These separate a brief that moves from one that informs. They are the most common things missing, and they are what to probe hardest in GRADE and demand in BUILD. Each is explained with examples in `references/standard.md`; the short version:

1. **Reframe the problem.** The highest-leverage move and the one almost nobody makes. Briefs accept the problem they were handed. The craft is to question it: *you said the problem is low awareness; the real problem is that people understand the product fine and do not believe it is for them.* Always tie the reframe back to the original ask with a rationale strong enough to defend, "you told us X, we think the real problem is Y, and here is why." A reframe without a rationale is just a hunch. 2. **Observation vs insight.** An observation is what everyone already knows ("road accidents are caused by human error"). An insight is the turn underneath it with tension in it ("everyone knows accidents are human error, but almost no one beli