The brief is where most video projects are already won or lost

Key takeaways

• Constraints help. Vagueness does not. A brief that specifies the problem and leaves the solution open is the useful kind of open.
• Name the decision-maker in the brief. Approval chains discovered late are the single most common cause of rework.
• Four decisions cost money later: undefined deliverables, late localisation, unresolved approvals, and text baked into the image.
• A success measure belongs in the brief, not in the review meeting.
• References are worth more than adjectives. Three links with one sentence each will shape a production more than a page of description.

What makes a good video brief?

A good video brief defines the problem, the audience, the single message, the success measure and the practical constraints, and leaves the creative solution open. It names who approves the work and what has already been decided. Briefs fail more often from vagueness than from over-specification, because a vague brief moves the decisions into the review stage, where changing them costs the most.

Why do open briefs produce worse work?

Because "surprise us" transfers the risk to the wrong place. An agency given no constraints has to guess at budget, audience, tone, approval appetite and internal politics, and it will guess conservatively or guess wrong. Either way the first presentation becomes an expensive information-gathering exercise.

There is a useful distinction between two things that both get called openness:

The left column constrains the problem and frees the solution. The right column does the reverse, and the reverse is what produces three rounds of concepts and a compromise.

Which brief decisions cost money later?

Four, consistently. Each is close to free to decide at briefing and genuinely expensive to change once production has started.

1. Undefined deliverables. "A film, plus some social cuts" is not a scope. Vertical versions, subtitle languages, cutdown lengths and aspect ratios all affect how the film is shot — framing has to allow for a crop, and that has to be known on the day. Deciding afterwards means either reframing badly or reshooting.
2. Late localisation. Planned from the start, a multi-market film is one production with variants. Retrofitted, it is a rebuild — on-screen text has to be replaced shot by shot, voiceover rerecorded, and any signage caught in frame becomes a problem. DFDS ran natively across UK, Dutch and German audiences from a single production because it was designed that way at briefing.
3. Unresolved approvals. Every stakeholder discovered after the concept is signed off resets part of the process. If legal, works council, or a regional MD has a view, that view is cheap in week one and very expensive in week six.
4. Text baked into the image. Graphics burned into the master have to be recreated for every language, every aspect ratio and every future edit. Kept as a separate layer, they are a re-render.

None of these are creative decisions. They are all logistics, and they are all decided by a sentence in a brief.

What should a video brief actually contain?

Eight questions. Answered honestly, they will fit on two pages and they will outperform any template.

1. What has to change? Not "raise awareness". Something observable — shorter sales conversations, better candidates, fewer explanation calls.
2. Who exactly has to see it? Narrow enough that distribution becomes a plan. "Everyone" means nobody in particular.
3. What is the one thing they should take away? One. A film carrying four messages delivers none.
4. Where will it be seen, and in what state? Muted on a phone, full screen in a pitch, on a screen behind a stand. Each implies different decisions.
5. What is the budget? A real number, not a range with a factor of five in it. It is the fastest way to a realistic proposal.
6. What is already decided? Existing brand guidelines, a locked tagline, a CEO who will not appear on camera. Constraints stated upfront are helpful. Discovered later, they are rework.
7. Who approves, and who else has a view? Name them. Include the people who are not in the process but will be shown it.
8. How will we know it worked? Agree the measure and the review points now. This is the question most often skipped, and it is covered in how do you measure whether a brand film worked.

Should you tell an agency your budget?

Yes, and withholding it costs you more than it protects.

The fear is that a stated budget becomes the price regardless of the work. That is a real risk with a bad supplier and it is not solved by concealment — a supplier willing to pad against a number will also pad against a guess. What concealment reliably does is produce proposals pitched at the wrong scale, which wastes a round for everyone and often loses you the agency you wanted.

A stated budget is not an instruction to spend it. It is the constraint that makes a proposal answerable. "We have €12.000, here is the problem, tell us what is achievable" is a substantially stronger position than a blind brief, because it invites a supplier to tell you what they would cut.

DOT publishes price bands per service for exactly this reason — projects run from €2.500 to €50.000, with most landing between €8.500 and €15.000. The bands are on the services page so the conversation can start from a shared number.

How should you use references?

Generously, and with a sentence attached to each.

A reference on its own is ambiguous. Send a film with no comment and the agency has to work out whether you liked the pacing, the casting, the grade, the humour or the fact that it was short. Three links with one line each — "this one for the restraint", "this one because nobody talks to camera", "this pacing, not this tone" — is the most efficient creative direction a client can supply.

Negative references are equally useful and almost nobody sends them. One film you actively dislike, with a reason, closes off more wrong directions than three you admire.

What should you leave out?

• A shot list. If the brief specifies shots, it has skipped the concept stage and bought execution instead of thinking.
• A script, unless it is genuinely locked. A draft script in a brief tends to become the brief, and the idea underneath it never gets examined.
• Company history nobody asked for. Two pages of background before the actual problem buries it.
• Adjective stacks. "Bold, warm, premium, human, dynamic" describes nothing and cannot be shot.
• "Cinematic". The most requested and least specific word in video briefing. What people usually mean is unpacked in what actually makes a video cinematic.

How does DOT handle briefing?

DOT Video Agency treats the brief as part of the work rather than as an input to it. Founders Tijmen van Grieken and Jesper de Rek take the scoping call directly, which means the questions above get asked by the people who will make the film rather than relayed through an account layer.

In practice most briefs arrive incomplete, and that is normal. The useful version of the first conversation is not a client presenting a finished document — it is twenty minutes spent finding the two or three questions nobody has answered yet. Those are almost always the ones that would have caused the rework.

Related reading

• How do you measure whether a brand film worked?
• The concept is the film
• What is a director's treatment?
• Video production services