The Subtle Art of the Rebrief
While working as an integrated producer at MediaMonks, Robert Novorolsky noticed that clients would often come to him with the end product in mind. But working at the forefront of creative digital production meant that, more often than not, the ‘end product’ wasn’t the right fit. So Robert found an approach to deal with this: the rebrief, boiling the brief down to the ambition, then coming up with the solution.
At the start of the year Robert started a new role as the first ever executive producer at Amsterdam-based independent brand experience agency HarrimanSteel and he’s brought his technique with him.
LBB’s Alex Reeves asked him to explain the process in more detail.
LBB> Why do you think client’s briefs often need challenging?
Robert> I think that brands have caught onto the trend of hiring former agency partners and people like that. They’re not necessarily thinking about challenging the status quo. They’re used to receiving a brief from a brand and making a strategy for it and moving forward. And as those people come in house a little bit they tend to think they can brief you better. Instead of coming up with a problem, they’re coming up with a solution and then telling you how to do it.
LBB> What’s your process for taking those briefs and subtly repositioning them?
When you see a brief like that come in you ask yourself a couple of questions: First, do I really want this work? It needs to hit a benchmark. Is it creatively stimulating or financially stimulating? What is driving me here because if it’s finance then I probably don’t want to challenge this brief because that’s going to create friction. If it’s creativity, do I see something inside that I think they haven’t thought of? Does that brief make sense or are they just telling me what they want?
Then you have to understand from that moment how you’re going to react. When you’re looking at a project and there’s something really special there but you don’t know what it is yet, those are the moments where you want to dive into this brief, strip it apart and try to get down to what it’s looking for.
You can point out to the client that they came up with a hypothesis and answered their own hypothesis. You can maybe challenge them on that level and ask them how they got to this stage: ‘You have this problem and you’ve found some value in doing it this way. Help me understand how you got here.’
I think that starts a relationship. Now you know the client is there as a partner. You’re not seen as challenging their ideas. You’re just trying to understand. And by creating this understanding you’re able to dive deeper into the brief with the client feeling like they’re on board. They’re with you along for the ride, ready to take this journey together.
LBB> It must be delicate though. You need to challenge a brief using diplomacy, right?
Robert> Exactly. You have to understand that an initial conversation is about how they got to this and how we understand it. I think the answer to that lends itself to saying ‘we do understand this, but do you mind if we take a stab at this from another angle?’ You’re positioning yourself as a partner.
Then you bring in the right people to attack that rebrief. If you don’t have the right people then there’s no sense in creating this rebrief structure for yourself.
LBB> And for that, what does the ‘right people’ mean?
Robert> It’s diversity. Over and over again brands have people that look too much alike, sound too much alike, eat and drink the same things. They aren’t outside of that bubble. The first step is to find diversity in your team, creatively, strategically and production-wise
I’m a white male - I have all the privilege in the world. Luckily I had very strong female characters around me growing up, then going to military school I saw men and women treated in the exact same way. When you have that and you take colour and cultural elements, strip it down and everybody can do anything they want to do. They’ve just got to put their mind to it. And if you have a team of people that all have the mindset that they can do the best at what they do, they’re going to do the best together. It’s up to us to craft those teams, make sure everybody has a voice and that those voices are heard equally.
That also empowers people to speak up further and have bigger ideas. I’m a huge fan of opening things up, not just for the sake of opening them, but putting different things on the table.
LBB> How do you motivate that kind of discussion?
Robert> One of my favourite ones is: ‘If time and money weren’t a problem, is this the same way you’d do it? What would you do differently?’ Then their brains open up a little bit and you can ground it back into reality: ‘You do have a brief, a client, a budget and time restrictions. How can we still get to that same point?’
Taking the time to look back when you’re in the middle of a project and say: ‘Things have changed so dramatically from where we wanted it to be and what was signed off at the beginning. Let’s sit down for a second and have a brain dump.’ Pie in the sky stuff, if the client came back and said they’d doubled the budget and the time, what would you do with that? It’s fun to let people create and push themselves in that sense. It makes for a good working environment, which is culturally what I want to get to.
LBB> When do you know that a brief is going to need to be reworked into something different?
Robert> I’ve done this process of rebriefing probably 50 to 100 times and maybe only pushed all the way through two or three times. The reason is sometimes you realise that the hypothesis that the brand came up with is true, but maybe the way they described it to you is a little different. And because you brought them along as a partner in this rebriefing process, you’ve probably come to a solution together and it’s signed off almost as if it was the brief all along. That’s the bread and butter of it - working on the brief together over iterations and realising why. Sometimes it’s an ‘aha’ moment when you’re in a workshop - you realise you’re all saying the same thing in different ways. Other times you get that brief in and you keep taking baby steps forward until you finally feel like you and your counterpart on the brand side have come up with something they can give to their bosses, that we can pitch together. And because you’re able to take them along step by step you don’t waste their time.
You know pretty quickly. Either you’re going to fully switch this thing or stay on track with a small pivot, but you’re on the track together.
LBB> Do you think the process of rebriefing your client is more relevant to innovation-focused companies like HarrimanSteel than more traditional agencies? It seems like those sorts of briefs might have more misconceptions in them.
Robert> Yeah. I do agree. But it’s the fact that the industry is moving so fast that brands can’t hold that knowledge in house. Especially when you’re working with massive multi-billion-dollar companies. They may not be able to move with the trends. So they expect their partners to be able to keep them in the loop about it. The innovation labs that production and creative houses are investing in - that is knowledge that the brands don’t need to hold in house.
That’s why this works so well in the digital and innovation space.
I think if more of us started talking together and building up a rapport in client relationships, they would realise earlier on why innovation’s important to bring in.
LBB> In that innovation sector you must get a lot of briefs that are just about wanting to jump on a tech trend. What’s the most common?
Robert> AR and VR just for the sake of it. I think they have a great place in a lot of brand stories, when they’re done right. But if you’re already telling me in your brief, ‘make me something VR’, it’s not really a brief. There’s no reason for it. That’s not a problem I’m solving; it’s just creating another problem.
A brief should be: ‘I have a business problem that I need to overcome. Can you help me?’
I think a great example of that is a company like Samsung. I recently worked on a project with Samsung and Family Guy. Samsung wanted to create a buzz around its smart home technologies. And they wanted to make it entertaining. Those are problems. They wanted to get consumers excited and get them to interact with these products in a special way. That’s an actual brief and you can come up with cool AR solutions for that.
