Disclaimer: I was having a really bad day when I wrote this last year. My apologies.
Fucking hell! This trash can really stinks! What the hell do those creatives do here at night? Pheeeeeew!
Oh. Hi there. Welcome to my sad little world. I’m sure you’re wondering what all the fuss is about. Well, let me tell you. I’m a brief… er… no that’s not quite right. I was a brief. Ok. That’s not quite right either, but it will do for now.
To begin. I sorted of started down this dismal spiral into oblivion as a thought, nay, a Problem. A marketing problem in the mind of a Brand Manager in charge of A BIG BRAND at A BIG CORPORATION.
So there I am, bouncing around in this brand manager’s head (lot’s of room in there, by the way). And brand manager decides “let’s make this somebody else’s problem, eh? Call the agency.”
And faster than you can say “let’s have a meeting”, there I am being told to representative from The Agency, otherwise known as the Account Manager. At this point I became A Verbal Brief. I guess that’s when I was really born. While I was ricocheting off the insides of the brand manager’s skull you could say I was just a foetus of a brief. And let’s face it, foetuses turning up in unexpected places can be a bit of a Problem.
Wafting through the air in waves of sound I left the brand manager with one less Problem and snuck into the unsuspecting head of the account manager (less room in here, but not by much) as a new-born Brief From The Client.
____
Three days later I was growing up fast. The account manager had called meetings, held brainstorms, googled every word the brand manager had uttered and spent a nervous few hours dreaming up a strategy that worked. And finally…
I was a Brief! No. I was A Great Brief! I had a well-thought out Background. A fantastic Insight into the target market. A splendid Creative Proposition. I was the Mother-Of-All-Briefs! So I was taken to the creatives.
They loved me! Truly they did. They hung on my every word. They licked their lips at my Insight. They were like dogs in heat when they saw my Creative Proposition. The god-of-all-briefs they called me. It was my moment in the sun. I was at the prime of my all too short existence.
They took me to their desks. They decided that a brief like me could only be suitably addressed away from the office. So they took me to a bar to discuss me, although I still have no idea what the sex-lives of their colleagues had anything to do with me anyway. I almost got forgotten there, though. It was only through pure fortune that I ended up in the sports pages of a magazine that they hadn’t read.
They found me two days later.
____
The work was finally ready to be presented to the client. Everybody was excited. There was a buzz. You could feel the adrenalin and smell the Red Bull as they trooped off to the brand managers BIG CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS.
The work was presented.
And debated.
And re-presented to a committee.
And further debated.
And re-presented to the board.
And debated some more.
And finally.
Rejected.
____
I was re-written.
Badly.
Out went short, punchy words like hip to be replaced with polysyllabic, meaningless gibberish like metropolitan.
Out went my former, great creative proposition to be replaced with a vague, indeterminate, nebulous, amorphous sentence of dubious grammatical construction and even more dubious, vacillating, uncertain market-speak and techno-babble-bullshit.
I was a pale shadow of my previous shining example to all briefs.
I became the doddering old fool muttering grimly to himself in dark corners about how much better the good old days were from whom all the kids run away.
I wasn’t even worth the 80 gsm recycled white rag paper I was being re-printed on.
Then I was taken back to the creatives.
Which
is
how
____
I ended up next to half a burger that smells like it’s been in this bin for a week. And… hey, that looks like another brief back there next to the Steers box. If I could just reach… oh fuck it. I couldn’t be bothered.
Anyway, I’ll soon be off to the great waste-of-time-and-effort in the sky. I do hope my successors have a better life than mine.
Ta.
