Content marketing and the value of creative brief in advertising

Content is the substance of any communication. When man first acquired the power of communication in the prehistoric dawn of civilization, it was the content, the stuff of communication that drove him to use devices like signs and sounds to get the message across. In content marketing, the most important thing is to know what a brand, company, or business exactly wants to communicate and everything else follows.  

Ideally, there should be a well thought out content marketing strategy behind every advertising campaign. In Pakistan, there is usually a gap between a brand’s understanding of its marketing effort and its ability to communicate it to its creative agency. The problem arises not from the lack of content but from ignoring the most important factor that forms a bridge between marketing and advertising; it’s the creative brief.

Writing a creative brief is a painstaking job. Marketers and brand managers, who think they know their brand inside out, have to fall back on research, brand positioning, and a complete product analysis before filling in an apparently simple creative brief from.

The elements of creative brief are background, target audience, problem, insights, objective, message, competition, communication, budget & timeline. Considering these elements from the brand’s or the business’ perspective determines the direction of advertising.

There are a handful of brands in Pakistan, the majority of them are MNCs, that take into account the elements of the creative brief. This culture has made the job of advertising agencies a lot more challenging and nerve-wracking. In most cases, the agencies have to reverse engineer the problem, insights, objective, and other things to ground their creative ideas in realistic soil.

Be it content marketing or any other method of brand promotion, the bottom line is to increase sales. But that’s the hardest part and that’s why companies spend millions on marketing and advertising just to make sales happen.

We don’t live in a world of sign language. As communication tools and techniques gave birth to complex languages, our marketing communication is also evolving into complex methods of communication. The advent of digital media is another catalyst in the evolution of marketing. Now, new technologies are posing new challenges that always become an opportunity to create something new. No matter how advanced and cutting-edge technologies the human race develops, the journey of marketing will start from the content. Content marketing will never die.