Inside a Signal Co Campaign Brief: What We Ask Before We Pitch a Single Idea

Creative teams love to skip straight to ideation, and clients often encourage it, because ideas feel like progress and briefs feel like paperwork. We've learned the expensive way that the paperwork is the work.

Every campaign at Signal Co starts with the same five questions, answered in writing and signed off by the client before a single concept gets sketched: what has to be true after this campaign that isn't true today, who specifically needs to believe it, what do they currently believe instead, what's the one thing we can say that changes that, and how will we know it worked.

That last question, how will we know it worked, is the one clients resist most and need most. Without a defined success metric agreed before the work starts, every round of feedback becomes subjective, and 'I don't love it' becomes an acceptable reason to send work back to the drawing board indefinitely.

It's not a glamorous process. But it's the reason a campaign we shipped for a client can go from brief to air in three weeks instead of three months — because everyone agreed on what we were solving for before anyone spent a day designing a solution.