Practical tool
Commercial Production Brief
Nine fields, filled in before a shoot, a campaign or a content calendar is scheduled. If a field cannot be answered, that gap is the finding — not a reason to start producing anyway.
Free to use and free to copy. No email required, no download, no score.
What this helps you decide
Whether a piece of content, a shoot or a campaign has a commercial reason to exist, and what it should therefore contain.
What it cannot determine
It cannot tell you whether the content will work, what it should cost, or how much demand it will produce. It establishes whether the brief is complete — a complete brief is a precondition for a useful result, not a guarantee of one.
Evidence you will need
- Performance by daypart, segment or unit for the last ninety days
- The current offer and its contribution after cost
- The conversion path as it exists today, walked on a phone
- Who currently answers enquiries, and how fast
The nine fields
Answer in order. Each constrains the next, and answering out of order is how calendars end up leading strategy.
- Commercial target — which number moves, from what to what, by when. Not “awareness”.
- Buyer or guest — describable enough that you would recognise them in the room. Not a demographic bucket.
- Occasion — what is happening in their life that makes this relevant now.
- Offer — what is being proposed, and whether it holds margin after cost.
- Asset — what gets made, and why that rather than the obvious alternative.
- Channel — where it runs, and why that channel reaches this guest.
- Conversion path — where they go next, and whether that path exists yet.
- Response owner — who answers a reply, within what time, including when they are with a guest.
- Measure — what is checked, and on what date.
Production decisions the brief should already have settled
- The hour and light the shoot happens in, because it should match the hour of the problem.
- Which dish, room or space is featured, decided from contribution rather than pride.
- Whether video earns its cost, or a still carries the same information.
- Whether aerial production has a commercial point, or is scale for its own sake.
- What the asset must prove — the specific doubt it exists to resolve.
Before it goes into the calendar
- The conversion path has been walked end to end on a phone, today.
- The response owner has agreed the response time in writing.
- The measure and its review date are recorded somewhere both parties can see.
- Someone has said out loud what would make this a failure.
Next step
Fill this in retrospectively for your last thirty days of published content. The fields you cannot answer are the brief you were missing, and the pattern in what is missing is usually more useful than any single gap.
If the answers point somewhere uncomfortable and you would rather not work through it alone, request a diagnostic. The tool is useful whether or not you do — how this is researched and published is set out in the Editorial Standard.