Your AI-written brief might wreck your brand's chances of finding the right creatives

The useful part

Some agencies are using it to accelerate the research and ideation parts of their processes, while some clients want studios to incorporate AI assets. A less-often discussed impact is what AI's doing at the very beginning of the process, when a business is looking for an agency to develop its brand identity. The founders of small startups used to write personal briefs that could win them a talented creative agency at reduced rate if the project was interesting enough.

How it works

• They've been generated by an AI in a matter of seconds, and bulk sent to every agency sitting at the top of a Google search." (Image credit:
• Most agencies will take a punt on a startup, perhaps the piece of portfolio work would be good and open a new category or new doors, perhaps we even just liked the founder on a personal level.
• It's much harder to tell which of those founders is worth betting on." ", the AI models all have their set of rules for how we agencies should respond to this life-changing opportunity heading our way.
• A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives.
• You give it information about your product and serve, and it will generate a brief based on what it believes such a document should look like according to its training.

What to take from it

That might feel like efficiency, but, shooting into the void like that is unlikely to get the attention of the right agency. If a founder with big ambitions but limited budget pitched an interesting idea, an agency might take a risk on them if they liked the concept, hoping that relationship would pay off further down the line or provide a good portfolio project in a new area. The problem is that there's no standarised brief that fits every business.

Example or evidence

• "A founder this size doesn't need a fraction of that yet, and often can't afford even one element of it, but the AI doesn't know that.
• It just writes the most comprehensive brief it can generate and fires it out." AI can write the brief in seconds, and the startup can sent it out to dozens of agencies simultaneously.
• By using AI, business founders are forgetting that many of the best creatives are discerning when it comes to choosing clients: you need to sell yourself to them as much as the other way around.
• At the end of each "brief" is the process and list of everything required to send our proposal.

Details worth keeping

"That's exactly the kind of project we'd take a chance on. The result is that serious agencies will simply send a quote at the same costing which we would send to a global client group, not a startup. It's either that, or we don't respond at all.".

Related coverage

• Inc: More than polished prose, creative agencies need human opinions instead of AI outputs.
• Creativeboom: A new report by MikeTeevee asks in-house leaders at some of the world's biggest brands what AI is doing to their own teams, and their feedback unearths problems that were brewing long before the tools...
• Hbr: A year-long study found that while the technology can speed up work, it can also lead to unrealistic client expectations and costly reworks.