If the brief was bad, it means the client doesn’t really understand what they want to see. Which means that the agency’s presentation has to do TWO things. It has to educate the client about what they should want AND it has to persuade them that this specific execution is the right WAY to do it. While that is often the case, it is justifiably frustrating for the agency.

The main problem I see, in addition to poor input to the agency, is a a flawed or even absent ability on the client side to handle agency output! Time and time again, I have seen good ideas (off of bad briefs!) die because the client has not thought about how to “operationalize” the idea. In other words what are the processes and who are the people required to give an idea the support it requires? In addition, I almost never attend post-mortems in advertising. People never want to look back, unless something was a success, and this is a huge lost opportunity.

Jeff

You have to know where to look for it…
You have to know what to look for…
You need the right tools to bring it to surface.

Regards,
treasurehuntreview.co.cc

Your email address lists you as donny@donny.com. That appears to be Donny Osmand’s web site. If you’re THAT Donny, then welcome to the marketing business. If you are not, why the subterfuge?

Enfatico may not be what Sir Martin, its supporters, or its clients at Dell had hoped WPP could create. Those inside would agree that there are lot’s of factors involved, including the unfortunate timing of a global recession. However, experimentation (including the Enfatico experiment) is part of the innovation process. WPP and Dell innovated, and learned. They are improving in ways that would have been impossible without that learning. As Erin Nelson stated in the same article “We learned a lot. There are pieces of the relationship that we absolutely love.”

Let’s discount the disregard inherent in your term, “chop shop,” and assume that you meant no disrespect to all the hard working people in our industry who are employed in marketing communications production. If we do, the answer to your fundamental question of “what kind of brief” is simple. A well thought out one.