Marketing fatigue, ad fatigue, banner blindness – different name, same issue. People see too many ads and switch off.

But there is a far more sinister switch-off on the horizon. Brief fatigue. Not the tiredness of the people seeing the ads, but the creative exhaustion of those making them.

Jon Williams, founder and CEO of creative powerhouse The Liberty Guild says it’s time to forget ad fatigue – we’re now in the era of brief fatigue.

‘Go again’ are the two most terrifying words in the creative department.

When you get that thing called a ‘boomerang brief’ – one that keeps coming back – it can genuinely sap your soul and mean that you lose the will to live.

If we’re honest with each other for a moment, there are only so many ideas someone can have for one brand product or service. There is one big global client, of whom it’s said, never actually buys work – instead it just runs out of time and has to run whatever is on the table.

But here’s the thing. ‘Go again,’ while terrible for the creative department, is actually good for the finance department. When an agency is run on an hours-based model, the more time it spends redoing the same brief, the better its margin.

Client procurement knows all too well that so much money is wasted dealing with this.

Crap in, crap out

A lot of the time it’s to do with bad briefs. Sorry if you haven’t seen this, and far be it from us to burst any bubbles, we’ll let the Better Briefs Project do it; but its research showed that 78% of clients think that the briefs they write are great, but only 5% of agencies agree.

That’s a big gap.

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It’s a cliche to say ‘crap in, crap out’. But, it’s kind of true. One way around this is to use the technology du jour, AI to help in the brief development process. We find augmenting the thinking is the most valuable contribution that technology can make.

This is why we train marketing departments to ‘brief better’ by teaching them how to use the technology to write better briefs. We took the WFA through this and they loved it. As do many of our clients.

Brief fatigue can happen in any agency, but the smaller the creative department the more likely it is to occur.

Teams are allocated in the traffic meeting on a Monday morning and if they’re free they’ll end up on the brief that’s come back in. The hospital pass. Or maybe it’s their brand and therefore their responsibility. Either way with a small pool of talent it’s gonna get them eventually.

That’s why we don’t work in the traditional way. That’s why we’ve built up a huge global talent pool that enables us to bring in not only the best and most appropriate creative minds to work on any given brief.

But also the freshest. Because that’s what clients want, fresh ideas; that’s why they come to any agency. Although in seven years we’ve only had to ‘go again’ once (you know who you are!).

Right first time

The other way to stop brief fatigue is by making sure that the work is right the first time. No one really wants to go again in today’s climate. Speed to market is a competitive edge you don’t want to lose time.

Ensure ‘right first time’ by ensuring your agency is embedding research into its creative process so real people, people who buy stuff, help to guide the work. We do this and it typically gives us purchase intent scores of north of 75%.

Sharp briefs and sharp processes are the ways to combat the problem.

Finally, try to read the word ‘brief fatigue’ without thinking of Jackie (not Jockey) Wilson’s Reet Petite. You won’t be able to. Unless you were born post-2000. In which case, you won’t feel fatigue at all.