campaign_brief v1.0.0

name: campaign_brief description: Write marketing campaign briefs that a team can execute without a follow-up meeting: one SMART objective with baseline and target, a named audience with a sourced insight, a one-sentence proposition with proof under every message, channels with one role each, a budget that sums, a backwards timeline, a measurement table with a readout decision, and RACI approvals. Use when drafting a campaign brief or creative brief, turning campaign notes or a kickoff doc into a brief, reviewing a brief for gaps before approval, or fixing a brief that produced vague or off-strategy work.

Campaign Brief

Purpose

Turn scattered campaign notes, a kickoff conversation, or a one-line request into a brief that creative, media, and product people can execute from without guessing. The brief is a decision document: it states what will change, for whom, by when, at what cost, and how the team will know. Anything the brief leaves open becomes a meeting, a revision round, or a wrong asset later.

Workflow

1. Separate the brief types before writing. A campaign brief covers the whole effort: objective, audience, channels, budget, timeline, measurement. A creative brief is the narrower document inside it for the people making assets: proposition, tone, deliverables, mandatories. If the requester wants both, write the campaign brief first and pull the creative sections from it. Two documents that disagree on objective or audience is a defect; fix the source, not each copy.

1. Write the objective last in the document, first in the work. Draft audience, insight, and proposition first, then state the objective, because a good objective depends on who it is for and what will move them. Use the SMART form: one primary objective that names the metric, the baseline, the target, a named owner, and a calendar date. SMART comes from George T. Doran, Management Review, November 1981; his original expansion was Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic, Time-related. The Assignable letter is the one teams drop, so name the owner in the objective block itself. At most two secondary objectives, each in the same form. An objective with no baseline gets a line saying where the baseline comes from and by when. "Raise awareness" with no metric, baseline, or date goes back to the requester as a question.

1. Define the audience by behavior and current belief, not demographics alone. Write: who they are, what they do today instead of buying, what they currently believe, and where they can actually be reached. Add exclusions with reasons; a segment the campaign is not for prevents wasted spend and off-brief creative. One primary segment. Add a secondary segment only when its creative or channels genuinely differ, otherwise it is the same brief wearing two hats.

1. State the insight, and name its source. The insight is the one observation about the audience the campaign is built on, phrased so it could be wrong: an observation, not a category fact. Under it, cite where it came from: interviews, surveys, support tickets, analytics, sales calls, with a count or date. No source means it is a guess; label it a guess and name the cheap early test that would confirm or kill it, such as an ad test in week one.

1. Write the single-minded proposition as one sentence. Complete this thought: the one thing the audience should remember is... The proposition is the strategic idea behind the work, not a tagline and not a list. If the draft needs "and" twice to hold together, it carries two ideas; pick the stronger one and move the other to supporting messages. Test: read it to someone outside the project. If they cannot repeat the point back in plain words, rewrite it.

1. Put proof under every message. At most three supporting messages. Each gets its reason to believe directly beneath it: a number with its source, a test result, a verifiable product fact, a quote the team has permission to use. A message with no proof gets cut, or marked unproven with an owner and a date for getting the proof. Claims the proof does not support get narrowed to what the proof does support.

1. Give every channel one role. Build a table: channel, role, audience slice, owner. Role is one of reach, capture existing demand, convert, retain, or prove (testimonials, reviews, demonstrations). A channel with the same role and the same audience slice as another channel needs a reason to exist or it is cut. Pick channels from where the audience is, per step 3, not from habit or from what ran last quarter. Record the tracking convention in this section: the utm_campaign value for the campaign, what utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_content will hold, all lowercase, since analytics tools treat values as case sensitive and mixed case splits one campaign into several rows.

1. Specify deliverables exactly. For each asset: format, dimensions or length, count, due date, owner. "Video" is an asset type, not a deliverable. "15 second vertical video, 1080x1920, captions burned in, two variants" is a deliverable. Include review rounds in the due dates. Vague specs are where timelines quietly die.

1. Build the budget as a table that sums. Lines for production, media, tools and fees, and contingency, with an amount and a percent per line. Amounts must add to the stated total and percents to 100; the checker verifies both. Allocate by expected impact and priority per channel role, not by equal shares. State what the contingency is for and who can release it, with the amount above which a second approval is needed. A budget with no contingency is a plan to ask for more money later.

1. Lay the timeline backwards from launch. Milestones with calendar dates and one owner each: brief approved, first drafts, final assets approved, launch, readout. Put approval time in as real dates; a brief that assumes same-day sign-off will slip. If a milestone date lands before the brief itself could be approved, the timeline is fiction; redo it before the brief circulates.

1. Write the measurement table before launch, not after. Columns: metric, baseline, target, source system, read date. The primary metric must be the metric named in the objective. Add guardrail metrics that must not get worse while the primary improves, such as cost per result, refund rate, support volume, or unsubscribes. End the section with the decision the readout drives: scale, fix, or stop, and who makes that call. A campaign with no stated decision produces a report nobody acts on.

1. Close with approvals and non-negotiables. RACI the brief itself: one Accountable person with final call, Responsible owners per deliverable, Consulted names, Informed names. RACI discipline allows exactly one Accountable per decision; two approvers means no approver. Add the approval deadline and what silence means. Then list non-negotiables: legal and claim limits, required disclaimers, things the campaign must not say or show, plus the top risks with an early signal and a planned response for each.

1. Run the checker, then brief the team out loud. Run python3 ~/workspace/skills/campaign-brief/bin/brief_check.py <draft.md> and fix every error. Then read the brief to the people who will execute it. Any question they ask that the brief cannot answer is a gap; patch the brief, not just the conversation, so the answer survives the meeting.

Start from assets/campaign-brief-template.md for a new brief. A complete filled brief is in references/worked-example.md.

Output Contract

Deliver, in this order:

1. The finished brief using the template sections: background and why now, objective, audience, insight, proposition, supporting messages and proof, channels, deliverables, budget, timeline, measurement, approvals, non-negotiables and risks.
2. A gaps note, separate from the brief: every fact the requester still owes (missing baseline, unproven message, unnamed owner, unconfirmed budget), each with the person who owes it. Missing facts stay visible in the gaps note; they never get smoothed over inside the brief.
3. The checker output, or a note that it ran clean, with warnings explained rather than ignored.

Operating Rules

• Never invent a baseline, budget figure, audience size, or proof point. Unknowns go in the gaps note as open items with an owner.
• One primary objective, one primary audience, one proposition. A brief that tries to do two campaigns ships neither well; split it into two briefs.
• Every number in the brief carries its source or its read date. A statistic nobody can trace does not go in.
• Keep the brief short enough to read in one sitting: about two pages for most campaigns. Research, mood boards, and past campaign reports are attachments, not brief sections.
• The brief is approved or it is a draft; mark the status and date at the top. Work started on an unapproved brief is flagged in the gaps note.
• If the objective, budget total, or launch date changes after approval, the brief gets a fresh sign-off from the Accountable owner. Silent edits to an approved brief are how teams end up executing different campaigns.