Most briefs arrive pre-solved. “We need a new website.” “We need a video.” Someone chose the artefact before anyone said the problem out loud, usually because it’s what the last supplier sold.
Here’s the method we use instead. Three questions, in order.
What has to be true afterwards?
Not what you want. What must be different in the world once this work has done its job? More registrations. A room that understands the change. A funder who says yes. If we can’t name the after-state, no deliverable can hit it.
Who has to act?
Messages don’t land on “audiences.” They land on a person with a Tuesday: a parent deciding whether camp is safe, a board member skimming on a phone between meetings. Name that person and half the design decisions make themselves.a
Where will they meet it?
Only now does the artefact conversation start, and it’s a routing question rather than a taste one. A website carries registration well and urgency badly. A film builds feeling but can’t answer an FAQ at 11pm. A campaign’s job is to move people to wherever the actual decision gets made. For Amplify, that has meant three years of rebuilding the conference site itself, not just running ads about it.
You don’t choose the vehicle until you know the road. We’ve built the wrong artefact for the right brief before. It’s an expensive way to learn that.
This is the honest case for a studio that does more than one thing: not “we do everything,” but we’re not stuck defaulting to whatever we happen to sell. A web shop solves your problem with a website. A video house solves it with a film. We’d rather tell you when you need neither.b
Bring us the problem before you’ve solved it. The three questions work just as well on a project that’s already underway, so if you’re mid-brief and something feels off, that’s usually why.