A good video production brief fits on one page and answers seven questions: what business outcome the video serves, who exactly will watch it, what they should think or do afterwards, where it will be distributed, what constraints exist (budget range, deadline, brand rules), what has worked or failed before, and who signs it off. Give a production company those seven answers and quotes arrive comparable, treatments arrive relevant, and the project starts a fortnight ahead. Here is the template, with notes on filling it in, and the mistakes that make briefs useless.
The Seven-Question Template
1. Outcome: the business result: leads, ticket sales, recruitment, internal alignment. Not “a video”. 2. Audience: specific: “operations directors at mid-size UK logistics firms”, not “businesses”. 3. Message and action: the one thing they should remember and the one thing they should do. 4. Distribution: channels and formats: a LinkedIn-first film is built differently from a keynote opener, per our format thinking. 5. Constraints: budget range (say it), deadline, brand and compliance rules, available people and locations. 6. History: links to past videos with one line each: what worked, what did not. 7. Decision: who approves treatment, edit and final: one name per stage.
Why Being Open About Scope Helps You
Hiding your constraints does not produce sharper proposals. Instead, it produces guesses, and guesses rarely match what you had in mind.
So say what matters most: the deadline, the must-have deliverables, the people who must appear, and anything genuinely fixed. Then suppliers scale the treatment to fit.
Better still, that openness makes proposals comparable. Our comparison framework only works when everyone answered the same question.
Event Briefs: The Extra Section
For event coverage add: the agenda with must-capture sessions marked, venue and access details per the capability checklist, streaming requirements, and the content slate: what films and clips the event must yield, by when. That one section turns event quotes from guesswork into engineering.
Brief Mistakes That Waste Everyone’s Time
Prescribing the solution (“we need a drone”) instead of the problem. Committee adjectives (“dynamic yet professional, corporate yet fun”) instead of an audience and an outcome. Reference videos with ten times your budget, unacknowledged. No named decision-maker: the revision rounds that follow are the most expensive line never itemised. And briefing five companies identically vague, then comparing five incomparable guesses.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should a video production brief be?
One page, two at most. Length signals indecision; specificity signals a project worth pricing sharply.
Should the brief include creative ideas?
References and instincts, yes: welcomed. Prescriptions, no: you are buying the company’s craft in turning problems into treatments.
When should the brief go out?
8 to 12 weeks before delivery for creative work: longer for event-linked films, per the booking timelines.
Send Us the Seven Answers
Use the template, send it over, and we will respond with thinking rather than a menu. Get in touch.
