What Do You Do When a Brief Doesn’t Contain a Story?
The brief is important. But is it interesting?
We've all had this kind of brief land in our inbox:
The company is celebrating its 50th anniversary. Amazing news! Can you let our customers know?
Or:
We've opened another office.
We've reached 1,000 customers!
We've just completed our 250th project.
You know the sort. Basically, the company has hit a milestone everyone inside the organisation understands is important.
The problem is that nobody can tell you why anyone else should care.
At this point, the writer is expected to 'fix things' with language. Inject some energy; create a sense of occasion. Big it up.
Thing is, no amount of 'proud', 'major' or 'exciting' will turn a dull fact into something an audience will engage with.
Stop writing. Start asking questions
Instead, shove your keyboard to one side and start asking questions.
What's changed?
What did it take to get here?
What does this milestone make possible now?
What does it reveal about the organisation, its customers or the wider market?
The anniversary isn’t always the story
When I was working for Sky Arts, I was given a brief to promote a strand of documentaries marking the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. Rather than simply announce the anniversary, I wrote about what Mozart still means to us: how his music continues to touch our lives at weddings and funerals, through love affairs, in restaurants, on planes waiting to take off and down the phone while we’re on hold. The anniversary supplied the occasion. Mozart’s continuing place in everyday life supplied the story.
Look beyond the headline fact
The same applies to customer milestones, new offices and completed projects. The real story might be what they reveal about changing behaviour, a problem solved, something the organisation can do that that it couldn't before, or the work it took to get there.
External audiences don't know what's going on inside the organisation. A customer, partner, stakeholder or journalist shouldn't have to dig through paragraphs of gushing adjectives and celebration to work out why the announcement matters.
That doesn't mean inventing drama. It means uncovering the change, tension, effort or consequence that's already there.
Sometimes there simply isn’t a story
There are times when you’ve asked all the questions you can think of, but your honest conclusion is that there is no external story. It happens. Then it's an internal email, or a social post or a thank you to the people involved. You can't turn every occasion into a campaign.
Find the story before choosing the format
Once you've found the story, the format becomes easier to choose. It might be an article, interview, film, case study, animation or pithy two-sentence announcement.
Good writing matters. As does a carefully-chosen adjective. But when the brief feels flat, a few questions will help you find the story.