I read a lot of B2B video briefs.
Too many of them say the same thing. Show the dashboard fast. Mention every feature. Keep it broad. Keep it safe. End with a call to action.
That is how boring ads get made.
I’ve been filming since I was 14, starting with skateboard videos on MiniDV tapes. Back then, if the opening was dull, people checked out. Same thing now. The buyer might work in cybersecurity, CX, compliance, or AI. Human attention still works the same way.
And this problem is bigger than my inbox. BetterBriefs says poor creative briefs cost the industry billions in lost marketing budgets every year. Mark Ritson also pointed out that 90% of marketers fail to brief agencies effectively. Video matters more every year, but only 14% of marketers say their video results exceed expectations. I would start by fixing the brief.
I’m a filmmaker first, entrepreneur second. When the brief is clear, I can see the commercial in my head. When the brief is messy, the video gets mushy. Simple.
Most B2B Briefs Are Written for Internal Comfort
If you’re a VP of Marketing at a mature company, you’re usually carrying a lot of voices into one brief. Product wants features. Sales wants proof. Leadership wants it safer. Legal wants it cleaner. The audience gets buried.
So the brief ends up trying to do everything. It wants to be a brand film, a product explainer, a sales enablement asset, and a launch piece all at once. Then the final ad feels like a committee note with music under it.
I see this with big enterprise brands and with newer startups too. The difference is that mature brands usually have more to protect. That makes the brief even tighter. You want to modernize the brand, but you don’t want to scare the room. I get it.
Still, safe usually gets you invisible. I don’t really care for safe videos. Safe ads will lose over time, especially when you’re up against louder brands that are willing to take a swing.
Start with One Job
Before anything else, decide what the video needs to do right now.
Is it a top-of-funnel brand ad? Is it a lower-funnel explainer? Is it a CTV spot that needs to look great on a television? Is it a paid LinkedIn video built to stop a scroll? Those are different jobs.
I shoot them differently too. A 90-second explainer can take a full day because it needs more coverage, more angles, more detail. A short brand awareness spot is built for speed, pacing, and recall. If one brief tries to force both jobs into the same 15 or 30 seconds, the result gets muddy fast.
When Schoox came to me, the job was clear. They wanted to make a dry category feel fresh and more fun. Their rebrand personality was fun and magical. That gave me a real angle. When Contact Point 360 wanted to show speed and loyalty in customer support, that gave me another clear angle. I could build from there.
Give Me the Stuff That Actually Helps
Before I start a campaign, I ask a bunch of simple questions. What are your business objectives? What products do you provide? What sets you apart from competitors? If your brand was a person, how would you describe that person? Who are we speaking to? What is the single-minded message you want them to walk away with? What should we include? What should we avoid? What action do you want them to take after watching?
Those questions are not there to slow things down. They help me find the real creative.
When Schoox told me their brand personality was magical, I came up with a magician as the hero character. When HockeyStack told me sales and marketing are always fighting, and the brand already had hockey in the name, I built a referee character giving out penalties for “high dissing.” When Contact Point 360 wanted to show how on-the-ball their support is, I put the customer service rep inside the customer’s house. That made the point fast.
That’s what a good brief does. It gives me tension. It gives me personality. It gives me a direction.
Give me the problem, the differentiator, and the tone. I can create ideas for almost anything from there. Software. Pet meds. Apparel. Customer support. Creativity is limitless. It’s infinite. But I need more than “mention our six key pillars.”
Stop Leading with the Dashboard
This is the biggest mistake I see.
If your brief says, “show the dashboard in the first three seconds,” you’re opening with homework. The audience feels that immediately. Most B2B brands are still distributing heavily on LinkedIn, and 76% of marketers use LinkedIn for video distribution. On that platform, weak openings die fast.
I want a strong visual at the front. Something that makes the viewer ask a question. What’s going on here? Who is this for? Why am I looking at this? That little question mark in their head buys you attention.
For Lavender, I opened one explainer with Lavender Joe getting dragged away by the email police. Sirens, chaos, a lime green suit. For Replicant, I shot a rainy diner at night with the power cutting out. For AskNicely, the host asks strangers in a park to rate their bench-sitting experience from one to five. Those openings stop people because they feel like scenes, not ads.
I like making ads that don’t look like ads. People are tired of being slapped in the face with still another commercial. If you want them to keep watching, the front of the brief needs to leave room for curiosity.
Keep the Front Half Less Dashboardy
If you absolutely need product UI, fine. I’m not anti-dashboard forever. I just don’t want it killing the hook.
Put the UI later. Put it in the back half. Put it in the end bumper. Put it in the retargeting explainer. Keep the front half less dashboardy so the ad has a chance to breathe.
The worst opening is a slow shot with no audio and no clue what’s happening. I want energy early. I want a crazy visual at the front. I want the viewer to feel pulled in, not assigned a task.
If this is going on CTV, this matters even more. At home, my wife and I watch the 15- and 30-second ads on our Netflix plan. We’re not staring at our phones the whole time. If the joke lands, we repeat it to each other. That’s attention. That’s what you want.
Brief the Problem, Not Your Whole Platform
Feature bloat kills a lot of B2B briefs.
A mature platform usually has a lot going on. Tons of use cases. Tons of proof points. Tons of internal owners who want their piece included. So the brief tries to squeeze the whole company into one tiny ad.
I prefer to dramatize the problem. Then I let the tagline or the end beat connect it back to the brand. For now, we’re just trying to create a laugh and grab attention. We can go deeper later.
Marketers know story matters. 61% of marketers produce branded-story content. But a German B2B study found that 69% were familiar with storytelling and still did not apply it in their communications. I see that gap all the time. The brief says “storytelling,” then the script opens like a spec sheet.
Maze is a good example. Their product helps security teams cut through false positives and focus on the few alerts that matter. That can get dense very fast. So I look for a metaphor people can feel. In one direction, I used the idea of finding the three people who matter out of a huge crowd. It makes the pain clearer right away.
Aligned was similar. Their sales product became a dating scenario. The guy asks, “what are next steps?” on a date. He even pulls out a PowerPoint. It’s funny because the audience gets the behavior immediately.
I also don’t love the old before-and-after ad structure. It feels tired. If a client wants a quick “after” shot, I can do that. I’ll shoot a short solution beat at the end and then we can A/B test both versions. One with just the problem and tagline. One with the solution added in. Easy.
Tell Me How Bold You Can Go
A lot of teams say they want memorable work. Then the brief quietly removes every interesting option before I’ve written page one.
So tell me the truth. How far can we go?
If you want safe, we can keep it safe. I’m collaborative. I’ll work with your team and your leadership style. But personally, I don’t really care for safe videos. The market is crowded. The best marketing wins. Safe usually gets ignored.
I push boldness because people remember it. I also know how to de-risk it. One of my favorite ways to de-risk a video campaign is by shooting 10 to 15 ads in one day. That gives us room to diversify the scripts from safe to bold to unhinged. Now you’re testing a mix instead of betting the whole budget on one idea.
I’ve pitched some risky concepts. One cybersecurity idea played on the line “practice safe tech.” A founder liked it. An older investor didn’t. Fine. That happens. Art is opinion, not fact. On the other side, Maple approved a much riskier opening with a confident naked man covering himself with an open laptop before the telehealth reveal. Some brands want that edge.
I still have a hard boundary. I do not want humor that punches down or makes fun of specific people. Bold and unhinged comedy videos can still be smart. They can still be brand-safe. I’m aiming for a strong positive reaction from the right audience, not a bland reaction from everybody.
And no, I’m not going to tell you one video will 10x your business. I hate that kind of promise. My job is to create the best funny, cinematic video possible and hand your team strong assets. Then your paid team does its job. I have seen some of my brand awareness videos outperform traditional direct-response ads in leads and discovery calls, but that still takes real distribution and strategy on the client side.
Think in Campaigns, Not One Lonely Ad
I hate ad fatigue. Seeing the exact same ad over and over drives me nuts. Your buyers feel that too.
So when I read a brief, I’m already thinking bigger. Can this idea turn into a series? Can we create multiple hooks? Can we test different openings, different first lines, different pain points, and different cuts while staying inside the same campaign world?
Lavender Joe worked because he was more than a one-off joke. He became a recurring character. People recognized him at Collision in Toronto. He was even recognized in Italy by a person off the street. That kind of recall does not come from one lonely ad.
LivePerson worked the same way in a different style. We kept the orange brand world, but we changed characters and setups so the campaign felt fresh while still being familiar. PetMeds needed 20 assets in two days across TV and social, in horizontal, square, and vertical. That only works when the brief is written like a campaign from day one.
There’s also a practical reason for this. 67% of marketers say video has become more important to their business over the past year. At the same time, Content Marketing Institute found that 69% say time to produce video is a top challenge and 56% say producing video consistently is difficult. That is exactly why my model exists.
I batch production. I keep the crew in one location. I structure the scripts so we can actually shoot them. Then I bring down the budget by 50% or more and add 10x the content. My typical package is around $30,000 for 10 high-quality commercials, which gets the cost down to about $3,000 per video. Traditional setups can spend way more and give you one or two spots.
And most companies still aren’t getting enough life out of what they already made. Only 7% of marketers say they use their existing video content to its full potential. That tells me the answer is not “make one precious ad.” The answer is build a system.
Sparkpolo is a good example of why volume matters. That campaign used 10 paid social videos and achieved a 3.73% click-through rate with a $17.16 cost per lead. I’ve also had a client cover their entire production budget from a single sale generated by a CTV ad. That’s why I’m so big on asset volume and testing.
Make the Brief Production-Smart
A creative brief should also help production. It should not just help approval.
If you want scale, keep the world shootable. One location all day is gold. A house, an office, a park, a diner, a studio. Great. Three unrelated locations across the city will eat your day and kill your asset count.
Tell me where the videos are going early. LinkedIn? CTV? YouTube? TV? Trade show screens? I’m a 16:9 guy. Vertical is cringe to me as a filmmaker, but I accommodate it because phones are vertical. If I know your channels early, I can frame everything properly for horizontal, square, and vertical.
Tell me the casting and production challenges early too. If the campaign needs dogs, cats, children, bilingual talent, or street interviews with strangers, I need that in the brief. PetMeds involved animal wranglers. AskNicely involved a host talking to people in a park. Replicant involved bilingual casting. Those details matter.
And tell me who signs off. Is it you? Your CEO? Your CFO? A bigger committee? I often write sample scripts and big ideas for free so an internal marketing champion can get leadership excited before the budget is approved. If the finance team is skeptical, I can even connect them with past customers to talk through value.
Clients also don’t have to sit on the sidelines. A lot of them fly to Toronto and join us on set. They watch casting, approve takes, and see everything come together in real time. A real campaign usually takes 45 to 60 days from planning, to casting, prep, shoot, and edit. A weak brief at the start creates problems all the way down the line.
What I Want to See in Your Next Brief
Send me a brief that tells me the one job of the video. Tell me who we’re talking to. Tell me the one pain point that matters most. Tell me the one message you want remembered when the ad ends.
Then tell me what makes your brand different. Tell me what your brand feels like as a person. Tell me what tone feels right. Tell me how bold you can go and what you truly need to avoid. Tell me where the ad will run and who needs to sign off.
That is enough to make something strong. That is enough to make a commercial that looks like a movie, like a CinemAd. That is enough to help your brand stand out without turning the brief into a mess.
Final Thought
I’ve been doing this a long time, from skateboard videos as a kid to campaigns for SaaS, AI, cybersecurity, customer experience, ecommerce, and CTV. One thing has never changed. If the opening is boring, people leave. If the brief is boring, the opening usually is too.
We create funny videos out of complex products. I just handle the bucket of video. Give me the audience, the problem, the differentiator, the tone, and the courage level. Then let me make something your buyers will actually want to watch.
Stop writing boring B2B video creative briefs. Write one that gives the idea oxygen.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can a legacy enterprise brand use a creative brief to safely pivot to edgy video content?
Start by isolating the risk. Don’t bet the whole budget on one unhinged idea. Brief the agency to shoot a high-volume mix – safe, bold, and wild – all in one day. This lets you A/B test a fresh, cinematic personality against traditional messaging without terrifying your board of directors.
Should our B2B video brief separate Connected TV (CTV) concepts from LinkedIn social ads?
No, brief them as a unified ecosystem. Your CTV spot is top-of-funnel entertainment requiring pristine 35mm pacing. LinkedIn is for scrolling. Brief the overarching narrative once, but demand asset variations specifically formatted for both horizontal broadcast and square social feeds.
How do I write a B2B creative brief that appeases Legal and Compliance without killing the humor?
Define your strict legal boundaries in a single ‘Do Not Cross’ section, then get out of the way. Humor dies by committee. Give me the rigid compliance rules up front, and I will build an unhinged, hilarious metaphor completely around them without violating your terms.
What is the true financial risk of a poorly aligned enterprise video brief?
It is a massive leak. Poorly aligned briefs cost the industry billions in lost marketing budgets every year. When VPs let product teams cram 15 features into a 30-second spot, the ad gets mushy. You waste production cash and entirely lose your buyer’s attention.
What budget should a mature enterprise allocate for high-volume cinematic video production?
Ditch the one-off premium model. Surprisingly, only about 17% of marketers allocate $50,000 or more per video. By batch-shooting 10 to 15 assets in a single location, you can build an entire episodic CTV campaign for a fraction of traditional agency costs.
