Big Business, No Clients? Knowing Your Fictional Customers In Brief

How adapting real briefs can help you create fictional adverts

Last time we thought about straplines, how they’re a great place to start for fictional organisations in nailing down a particular sense of communicable identity. The equivalent of a brand in the real world. Once you’ve got a strapline for your organisation, you can start thinking about the products that your organisation produces, and the way they’d advertise them.

To make this simple, we’re going to use a brief.

What is a brief?

Copywriters use briefs all the time. They help to guide clients through all the basic information that will help the writer understand the desired customer – the people they are writing to get the attention of. You want enough information to work with to have an outline for some ideas as fast as possible, and you only get that by asking questions.

What do you put in a brief?

There isn’t a singular template for a brief, but by analysing the following how-to and advice articles:

Big Bang Copy
Write on Tyne
Copywrite Matters
Rock Kitchen Harris
Marketing Donut
Harmer Editorial
Amble Glow
Write Arm
Caroline Gibson
Rose Crompton
Crafty Copy

We can create this table:

This is by no means a comprehensive study, consisting of a whole eleven sources, but as an intro and an interesting insight into the broader thinking, it’s interesting. Its also worth noting that I’ve fudged some of the entries here as everyone has their own phrasing and formats etc. To avoid having a hundred cells with one entry, I’ve homogenised some of the cells.

Rendering it down

So from the above the following are the most prevalent:

• Call to action: What do you want people to do? Sign up? Buy? Download? What?
• Delivery details: Anything that isn’t directly about the words themselves – general business details, contact details, industry, existing material, etc.
• Target audience: This is the most obvious one, but one of the most important. Who is your desired or imagined customer?
• Final product/format: Are you writing for a billboard or Facebook? It makes a difference.
• Purpose/aim/targets/objectives: I’m choosing to interpret this slightly differently than the ‘call to action’ in that it suggests more about metrics to me. Presumeably the client would want X number of clicks, or Y amount of revenue over the runtime period, etc.
• SEO: Because Google owns your first born.
• Tone: As indicated in the previous post – tone is important when addressing an audience. You’re not going to sell an executive saloon with the same quirky fun adventurous tone that you would use to advertise an entry-level hatchback. This one arguably derives from the audience, but is always worth nailing, because perhaps your client does want to try to flip the script and is trying to sell their product to a particular bit of the start up business market, and perhaps their data says ‘actually, they don’t care about the pretence of severity. No need to be so serious’.

Of course, that’s all real-world stuff. So, instantly, you don’t need to give a damn about delivery details, targets and objectives, or SEO.

You do want to know who the client is – ie: your fictional organisation. So stick a brief client bio in there. Then you want specifics of the product itself. Think of it as an implied subcategory – what are they advertising? What are the alternatives? Why is it better than the alternatives? etc. As an addition to that, add ‘pain point’ to the list. This is also important. Technically, I’d just handle this as part of the product, but, again, unless you know that you need to address that, you wouldn’t. Effectively, a ‘pain point’ is just the problem the product is trying to solve – so what problem is your advertised product trying to solve?

Context might be useful if there’s anything in your setting, timeline, etc that you think would impact the way in which your organisation presents itself. USP (unique selling point) is also sort of a subcategory of client bio, but is maybe worth thinking about as its own entity. It’s not absolutely essential for fiction, but if you can think of one, then include it. In the real world, the client should ideally have this ready to go by the time they’re trying to market a product. Misc. details are always an easy one to chuck in so you can cover any other details that don’t fit anywhere else.

Ad format is always worth considering. Are your characters encountering this on a billboard? A loudspeaker announcement? Social media? This is important because it’ll put an inherent restriction on the number of words you use. While you’ll probably want to keep things short anyway, it’s also worth considering that if your character is seeing the advert on social media, they’re not going to get a Jack Daniels-style spiel about how in 1792, good old Greg Humbersmith from the outskirts of Ruralsville, WY, had a donkey, named Jim, that bit his nephew’s niece’s third cousin’s aunt, Candice, on the arse so hard that….

So assembling all of that, we get something along the lines of:

• Business name:
• Industry:
• Client bio:
• Target audience:
• Product:
• Pain point:
• Context:
• Tone:
• USP:
• Ad format:
• Misc.:

Example

As previously, when I apply the same process to my fictional company ‘3D-F’ I get the following:

• Business name: 3D-F
• Industry: Food/Nutrition
• Client bio: 3D-F is a B2C food and nutrition company trying to create meal-replacements that remove the need for actual food.
• Target audience: Predominantly male, between the ages of 20-40, Silicon Valley-style hustle bro or aspirational girl boss. Upper middle class workaholic climber types. Fully paid-up member of the Cult of The Grind.
• Product: Nutrient Cube (TM)
• Pain Point: Time. Food takes time and needs to be optimised – even more so than through deliveries. How do you optimise food even further? Remove the “meal” part of food. Remove preparation. Remove eating. Just crush all the individual components of each piece of a meal into a geometric shape that you can shove into your gormless face-hole between mouse clicks.
• Context: N/A
• Tone: Vaguely reserved, borderline sophisticated, but casual/laid back/relaxed.
• USP: The food is all geometric shapes, aims to replace full meals, and can be consumed as a snack so the customers don’t waste time eating or cooking when they could be working.
• Ad format: Billboard ad
• Misc.: N/A

A brief time

And that’s it. I can use that brief to start thinking about how 3D-F might make billboard ads aimed at upper middle class grind cult acolytes. Anything I didn’t have a use for, I just put ‘N/A’ after. No fuss.

It’s a quick, easy template to use, it doesn’t take that long to work out, and might help crystallise some ideas that haven’t fully taken shape for you yet. Give it a go, if you’re interested.