Creative brief template for Ecommerce

The creative brief with three columns a store needs: which slice of the catalogue this asset sells, exactly which product is in frame, and whether the offer appears on screen.

Everything else is the general creative brief, unchanged. One row per asset, a hook written as what happens, one message with a proof beside it, the specs up front and an honest must-avoid.

Write it before a shoot is booked. In a store the shot list is the expensive part, and a shoot briefed from a campaign rather than from a list of assets produces footage that covers everything loosely and nothing exactly.

Use it again whenever the range changes. An asset naming a product that is out of stock is worse than no asset at all.

In a store the expensive part of creative is production, and production is booked from a list of shots. A shoot briefed from a campaign brief produces footage that covers the idea loosely and no specific asset exactly, and the editor then assembles nine near-identical cuts out of material that was never framed for any of them.

One row per asset fixes that, because the rows become the shot list. Each row names its format, its ratio, its hook and the product in frame, and the shoot is planned to produce exactly those. It is a slower hour of planning and it usually saves a second shoot.

It also exposes an uncomfortable and useful fact early: how many genuinely distinct assets the campaign actually needs. Most stores over-brief variations of one idea and under-brief the three different ideas that would have told them something.

The product in frame column looks like excessive detail until the first time it is skipped.

A shoot that produced beautiful footage of a colourway with two weeks of stock cover has produced an asset with a two-week life. A hero product that is discontinued next season takes its creative with it. A variant that was not the one the campaign was about produces an ad whose click lands on a page showing something else.

So the cell names the product, the variant and the colourway, and it is checked against stock cover before the row is committed. Where cover is thin, the better brief is usually an asset that sells the segment — the range, the category, the use — rather than the single unit, because it outlives any one line.

The offer shown column asks a question most stores answer by accident, and the default answer should be no.

An offer burnt into a video expires the day the offer does. In a category where promotions turn over every few weeks, that turns a well-made asset into a disposable one, and it means every promotion needs a new production round rather than a new landing page.

There are exceptions worth briefing deliberately: a peak week where the offer is the message, a clearance asset whose entire job is the discount. Those are rows where the answer is yes, written in the cell with the words that will appear and the date the asset stops being usable.

Everywhere else, the offer lives on the page the click lands on, and the asset survives the season.

Stores have the best proof available to any advertiser and frequently do not use it: the product, working.

The task performed end to end in real time. The fit shown on a person who is the size of the customer. The thing unpacked, assembled, used, cleaned. Those are expensive to fake and immediately persuasive, and they answer the question that actually stops an order, which is usually whether the thing will be as good as it looks.

Claims about quality are cheap and weak by comparison. Where a row's proof column says premium materials, the brief has not been finished.

The specification failure that recurs in this category is cropping.

A shot composed for a square placement, cropped to a vertical one, loses its sides; a product centred in one ratio sits under the interface in another. Because stores tend to produce one set of assets for many placements, this happens constantly and the result looks like a creative problem rather than a specification one.

Write the ratio each asset will run at, and where one asset serves two placements, write a safe area that works in both. Where the framing genuinely cannot survive the crop, that is two rows and two versions, and it is cheaper to know that at brief stage than after delivery.

The common ones are worth listing in every brief: no price on screen unless the offer shown column says otherwise; nothing from a discontinued line; no competitor product visible; no claim about delivery times that the operations team has not agreed; no music that cannot be licensed for paid use; no returns promise that the policy does not support.

Each is a line, each has caused a re-edit somewhere, and all of them are invisible to somebody who was not in the planning conversation.

The constraint most stores hit is not budget, it is assets. A season's library is finite, and it is usually spent in the launch weeks, which leaves the long middle of a flight running the same three cuts until they fatigue.

The brief is where that is planned rather than discovered. Write the rows for the whole flight, not only for the launch, and mark which ones are held back for the sustain weeks and which for the peak. A shoot that produces a launch set and nothing else has produced half a campaign.

It also helps to brief a cheap tier deliberately. Not everything needs a production day: a static from existing photography, a customer's own footage where you have permission to use it, a plain text-led card. Those rows cost little, they extend the library, and in a feed they frequently hold their own against the expensive ones.

Seven checks. One row per asset, each naming the exact product, variant and colourway. Every hook describes what happens in the first frame. Every asset carries one message with a demonstration behind it. Offer shown is answered explicitly, and the default is no. No asset depends on a product with thin stock cover. Must avoid names the colourways, claims and props that are out. And every due date leaves room for a review and a re-edit before the day the asset is needed.