The brief is the deliverable.

The brief is the deliverable. Most agencies hide that fact behind a discovery deck because a document sounds like less than a strategy.

The deck takes longer to build, contains more pages, and feels worth the invoice. The brief is one page. The brief is also what the rest of the engagement is built on. Confusing the deliverables is how clients end up paying twenty thousand dollars for a slide deck and getting fifty dollars worth of usable instruction.

A real brief answers four questions in one page. Who is this work for. What does this work cause to happen. What would prove it worked. What is the team not allowed to do. The first three questions get asked in most discovery processes. The fourth almost never does. The constraints are where the strategy actually lives. A brief without constraints is a wish list.

Most discovery decks contain forty pages and answer none of those questions. The pages cover audience research, competitive landscape, brand history, cultural trends, and three to five strategic recommendations. The recommendations are abstracted to a level that lets the room nod. None of them tell the team that has to execute what to do on Tuesday.

The reason agencies build the deck instead of the brief is that the deck is a defensible invoice. A client who paid forty thousand dollars for a one-page brief feels short-changed. A client who paid forty thousand dollars for a forty-page deck feels they got value. The math is the same. The perception is wildly different. The agency that builds the brief and not the deck is harder to hire because the value is harder to display.

The clients who have figured this out ask a different question on the proposal call. They ask what the deliverable looks like at the end of the discovery phase. If the answer is a deck, they ask to see one from a previous engagement. The deck reveals the agency’s defaults. If the deck answers what the team is supposed to do on Tuesday, the agency builds briefs and presents them with surrounding context. If the deck reads as a standalone document with broad recommendations, the agency builds decks and the brief is something the client team will have to write on their own.

The brief is the deliverable. The deck is the wrapper. Most agencies sell the wrapper and forget the deliverable.

Don’t pay for the wrapper.

Pay for the brief.