Campaign brief template for Fintech

The campaign brief with four fields a regulated financial product needs: which product this is for, where it may be sold, exactly which claims the campaign intends to make, and the reference of the review that cleared them.

Everything else is the general brief, unchanged. One outcome, one metric, one message, one approver by name, and a definition of done with a date in it.

Write it before anything is designed, because in this category the copy is the constraint and the design is downstream of it. A brief that leaves the claims to the creative stage produces work that has to be rebuilt after review, every time, and the rebuild is always more expensive than the first version would have been.

Use it again whenever a rate, a fee or a term moves. Those changes make cleared wording stale, and the brief is where the claims were written down in one place.

Most campaign briefs are written as though the words were the easy part. For a regulated financial product the words are the hard part, and everything else waits on them. A design cannot be finished before the claim it carries is cleared; a landing page cannot be built before the disclosure it needs is known; and a media plan cannot be committed before the markets it may run in are settled.

So this brief front-loads the claims. The field asks for every claim the campaign intends to make, listed plainly — a rate, a fee, a speed, a comparison, an eligibility statement — and that list is what goes to review. Reviewing a list takes an hour. Reviewing finished creative takes a round of rework, and the rework happens under time pressure with the media already booked.

A brief with no review reference in it is not ready to start, however good the idea is. That rule sounds rigid until the first time it saves a launch.

The product field sets the economics: an account, a card and a loan have different approval rates, different funding rates and different margins, and a brief that covers two of them will be judged on an average that describes neither.

The jurisdictions field sets the permission, and it is exhaustive by design. A market not listed in the brief is a market the brief does not cover, and the person building the campaign is entitled to treat the list as complete. Where the same product carries different wording in two markets, that is two briefs rather than one with a footnote, because footnotes are the first thing lost when creative is built from a document.

There is a habit in this category of briefing a watered-down claim in the hope of avoiding a conversation with review. It produces weak campaigns and, worse, it produces campaigns nobody can improve, because the strongest true thing about the product was never written down anywhere.

Brief the claim you actually want. If review refuses it, that is information: record the refusal in the notes with the date and the reason, and the next brief for that product does not propose it again and does not spend another cycle discovering the same answer. Over a year those recorded refusals become the most practical guide a marketing team has to what its own product may say.

The primary metric in this brief should almost always be the event the business counts rather than the event the platform reports. An application started, an application submitted, an approved application and a funded account are four different numbers, and the gap between the first and the last is a fact about underwriting rather than advertising.

Brief the last one. A campaign judged on applications will reliably fund whichever creative attracts the most people who do not qualify, and it will look efficient for as long as nobody joins the two halves of the funnel together. The baseline and target fields are blank for the same reason: both depend on your own approval and funding rates, which no template can know and which change when the product does.

Name the exact page, and write down what has to be true on it: the same claim as the ad in the same words, the disclosure the review named, the eligibility statement where one applies.

The most common failure here is not a wrong ad. It is a correct ad pointing at a page that has drifted — a rate updated in one place and not the other, a fee summary moved below a fold, a comparison that was true last quarter. Putting the page's obligations in the brief means whoever builds it knows what they are, and whoever reviews it knows what to check.

A retargeting audience built from people who began an application is, in most frameworks, an audience defined by a financial circumstance. That does not make it forbidden, but it does change what may be said to it.

The safe version is a reminder rather than a reference: the same product, the same claims, the same disclosure, and nothing that implies knowledge of the reader's situation. Write that into the brief explicitly rather than leaving it to whoever builds the campaign. Retargeting is usually the cheapest line in the account, which makes it the one nobody questions, which is exactly why the constraint belongs in writing.

The channels field is a guard against drift. A brief written for search and a compliance-cleared landing page becomes, three weeks later, an account also running on two social surfaces whose placements nobody reviewed the wording for.

Write the channels in the brief and, beside each, what it is there to do and which claims it will carry. Where a surface imposes its own restrictions — a character limit that forces a disclosure off the ad, a format with no room for a fee summary — that is a fact about the channel and it belongs in the brief, because it decides whether the channel can carry this product at all.

A line of spend in an account that traces to no channel in any brief is a line nobody agreed to, and in this category it is also a line nobody reviewed.

The definition of done names a date, a number and a person. The date falls far enough after the flight that funded accounts have had time to appear. The number is the primary metric against the baseline, because the baseline was a fact and the target was a hope. The person writes it up.

Keep the closed briefs together with their review references. A year of them is a record of what this product has been allowed to say, what it cost to say it, and which claims were refused — which is a more useful asset than any single campaign it contains.