The Brief We Send Every New Client Before We Touch Their Ads

Most agencies go straight to the ads. They get access to the accounts, look at what's been running, inherit the brand guidelines, and start optimizing. They're treating symptoms before they understand the disease.

We don't do that. Before we write a single creative brief, before we pull a single report, before we restructure a single campaign — every new DTCo client answers 14 questions. Some take two sentences. Some take two pages. The answers, or lack of them, tell us almost everything we need to know.

This document has evolved over years of onboarding brands. Some questions came from disasters — situations where we had the wrong mental model of a brand's customer and created ads that drove the wrong people. Some came from wins — moments where a founder said something in their intake that cracked open a creative angle that scaled for 18 months.

Here's the actual brief, with commentary on what we're really asking.

The 14 Questions

1. Who is your best customer — not demographically, but psychographically?

We're not asking for "women 25-45 in major metros." We already know that. We're asking: what does this person believe about themselves? What do they aspire to? What are they trying to move away from? What does it mean to them to buy this product?

Bad answer: "Our target is health-conscious women in their 30s who care about clean ingredients."

Good answer: "She's already done the research. She's been burned by supplements that promise results and deliver nothing. She's skeptical, which is why she reads every label. When she finds something that actually works, she becomes an evangelist because she feels like she finally found the real thing in a sea of garbage."

The good answer gives us a creative brief. The bad answer gives us a demographic filter. We can't write ads about demographics. We write ads about people.

2. What problem does your product solve — from the customer's perspective, not yours?

Founders almost always describe their product from the inside out — what the formulation does, what the technology enables, what makes it different from category incumbents. Customers experience the product from the outside in — what their life is like before, and what it's like after.

Bad answer: "We use a patented dual-extraction process that increases bioavailability by 40%."

Good answer: "She can't fall asleep without her brain running through everything she didn't finish that day. She's tried melatonin, she's tried every 'sleep hack' in a wellness article, and nothing actually quiets the noise. Our product does."

The bad answer is a feature. The good answer is a lived experience — which is what we're selling.

3. What's the real objection that stops people from buying?

Not the stated objection. The real one. When someone says "it's too expensive," what are they actually saying? Usually: "I don't believe this will work for me." When someone says "I need to think about it," what are they actually saying? Usually: "I'm not convinced I'm the right person for this."

The best brands know the objection under the objection. And their entire creative strategy is built around preemptively defeating it — not with logic, but with evidence, social proof, and story that makes the skepticism feel unfounded before the skeptic even raises it.

If a brand can't articulate the real objection, we know that their ad copy is full of claims that sound good but don't address the hesitation that's costing them the conversion.

4. What is your unfair advantage — the thing that's genuinely hard to replicate?

This isn't the same as your positioning statement. We're looking for the thing that would make a competitor uncomfortable if you put it in an ad. A founder's story. A supply chain relationship. An ingredient sourced from one place in the world. A manufacturing process. A clinical study nobody else has. A community of customers that would defend the brand publicly.

We need this because it's the thing we can build proof around. Claims without proof are just noise. Proof without claims is often enough. When we find a genuine unfair advantage, it becomes the spine of the creative strategy.

5. What do your best customers say in reviews and DMs that you'd never say in an ad?

This is one of our most-used intake questions because the answers are almost always gold. Customers use language that marketers would never write. They're specific. They're emotional. They're unguarded. They say things like "I stopped dreading getting dressed in the morning" or "my husband noticed before I did."

Those phrases — unfiltered, unpolished, real — are often the most powerful hooks in the creative library. We pull from review mining extensively. If a brand doesn't have enough reviews to mine from, that's a signal too.

6. At what level of awareness does your target customer currently exist?

This one requires explanation for most founders. We're asking about Eugene Schwartz's awareness spectrum: Unaware (doesn't know they have the problem), Problem Aware (knows the problem, not the solution category), Solution Aware (knows solutions exist, not your brand), Product Aware (knows your brand, hasn't bought), Most Aware (existing customer or near-purchaser).

Most brands default to Product Aware and Most Aware targeting — ads that assume the viewer already knows what the product is, why the category matters, and why this brand might be interesting. That works for retargeting warm audiences. It doesn't work for cold prospecting, which is where scale lives.

Understanding where your customer starts tells us what job the ad needs to do. A customer at "Unaware" needs the problem surfaced before the product is even mentioned. A customer at "Solution Aware" needs your brand differentiated from alternatives they're already considering. The ad creative is completely different depending on the answer.

7. What has worked in creative that surprised you — and why do you think it worked?

The "surprised you" framing matters. We're not asking for your best-performing ads — we want to know what broke your mental model. The UGC video that got 3x the CTR of your polished studio spot. The raw founder rant that drove more purchases than the testimonial carousel you spent $20K producing. The email subject line that felt too simple but crushed open rates.

These anomalies contain signals about where your audience's attention actually is versus where you assumed it would be. They also often reveal creative angles that were never deliberately tested — they just happened. We want to make them deliberate.

8. What has failed in creative that you expected to work — and what did you learn from it?

Every brand has a graveyard of concepts they were confident about that landed with a thud. We want to know what's in it. Not to rehash failures, but because the failure mode often reveals something important about the customer. The influencer collaboration that bombed might tell us the audience doesn't trust external voices on this topic. The product demo that got terrible thumb-stop rate might tell us the product's value proposition doesn't land visually.

Agencies that don't ask this question reinvent the wheel and repeat the same failures their clients already paid to learn from.

9. Who do you lose deals to — and why does the customer choose them instead?

We want to know the competitive landscape from the customer's perspective, not the brand's. Most brands describe competitors through the lens of what they're doing wrong or why they're inferior. Customers just see someone who solved their problem faster, cheaper, or more convincingly.

The answer to this question often reveals positioning gaps — moments where the brand's value proposition isn't landing against competitive alternatives. If customers are choosing a competitor for a reason the brand doesn't think is important, that's a creative brief waiting to be written.

10. What is your average order value, and what's the second-purchase behavior look like?

This is a business question, but it determines creative strategy. Low AOV businesses usually need volume and velocity — short consideration cycles, direct-response creative, frictionless checkout. High AOV businesses need more trust-building, more education, more social proof in the upper funnel before the conversion ask.

Second-purchase behavior tells us how retention works and whether the acquisition economics can be stretched. If 60% of customers buy again within 90 days, we can afford to run a tighter initial CAC. If second-purchase rates are low, we need to model the entire creative strategy around first-purchase profitability.

11. What's the single metric that would make this engagement a success in 90 days?

This question is a Rorschach test. Founders who answer "ROAS" are usually optimizing for the wrong thing. Founders who answer "new customer CAC below $X" are thinking about the right inputs. Founders who answer "I want to know what's actually working for the first time in two years" — those are our people.

We push back on ROAS as the success metric almost every time. ROAS is a platform-reported number that ignores everything happening outside the ad platform. It's an output. We want to know what input the brand actually needs to move. The answer changes everything about how we prioritize.

12. What are the topics, angles, or creative treatments you've decided are off-limits — and why?

Every brand has guardrails. Some are strategic. Some are emotional. Some are legal. We need to know all of them upfront, not discover them when we present creative. The "why" matters as much as the "what" — guardrails born from a bad past experience are often worth revisiting, while guardrails born from legal or regulatory requirements are non-negotiable.

Some of the most valuable conversations we have in onboarding come from founders explaining why certain topics are off the table. Those explanations reveal a lot about how they think about their customer and their brand — and sometimes they reveal a constraint that's been limiting their creative unnecessarily.

13. What does your customer's life look like before your product — and after?

Before/after framing is foundational to direct-response creative. But most brands describe it at too high a level. "Before: struggling with X. After: improved X." We want the texture. The specific moment. The morning routine that changed. The conversation that happened differently. The thing they can do now that they couldn't do before.

The more specific the before/after story, the more the right customer sees themselves in it — and the more the wrong customer self-selects out. Both of those outcomes are valuable.

14. If you could only tell a new customer one thing about your brand, what would it be?

This is the last question for a reason. By the time we get here, we've already heard the product benefits, the positioning, the competitive differentiation, the origin story. Now we ask: if all that context is stripped away and you can only say one thing — what is it?

The answers range from deeply practical to surprisingly emotional. Some founders say the one thing is about the formulation. Others say it's about the founder's story. Others say it's about the community. Occasionally a founder says something so specific and unexpected that it rewires our entire creative strategy.

That one thing becomes the filter through which we evaluate every piece of creative we develop. Does this ad communicate that one thing? If not, does it serve a purpose that supports it? If neither, why are we making it?

Why This Changes Everything

The brief doesn't just inform the first batch of creative. It becomes the operating system for the engagement. Every creative brief we write traces back to something in the intake. Every hypothesis we test has a root in the answers we got from questions 1 through 14. When a campaign underperforms, we go back to the brief before we go to the data.

Agencies that skip this step are running ads for a customer they don't know. They're guessing at angles. They're borrowing frameworks from other brands without the context to make them fit. And when results are mediocre, they optimize the wrong things — bids, placements, budgets — because they never built the right foundation.

The brief isn't glamorous. It takes 2-3 hours to do properly. But it's the highest-leverage thing we do in an engagement, and we've never run one that didn't surface at least one insight that changed our strategy in a meaningful way.

If you're working with an agency that never asked you questions like these, you should ask why.

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