How to Write a Video Brief a Client Will Actually Read

Most client work goes wrong before a single clip is cut, in a brief that says what the brand sounds like instead of what the video has to do. A brief full of adjectives — energetic, authentic, premium — is not a brief, it is a mood. The editor reads it, guesses, delivers something defensible, and spends the revision rounds discovering what the client actually meant.

A brief that prevents that is short and boring. It fits on one page and answers seven questions.

Why briefs fail

The failure is almost never laziness. It is that a client describing a video they have not seen yet reaches for adjectives, because they have no other vocabulary for what they want. "Make it pop" is a perfectly honest attempt to describe a feeling.

So the job of the brief is translation: turn feelings into examples and constraints. You are not writing a document to impress the client; you are writing one that makes the first delivery close to the final one.

1. The goal in one sentence

One sentence, with a verb and an outcome, that describes what the video has to achieve:

Get people who saw the product in a feed to open the product page.

That sentence decides everything downstream. It tells you whether a twenty-second teaser or a sixty-second demonstration is right, whether the opening frame should be the product or the person, and whether a call to action belongs on screen at all.

If the client cannot produce that sentence, write two candidates and ask them to choose. Choosing between two sentences is easy; writing one from nothing is not, and the conversation that follows usually reveals the real goal.

2. Audience and placement

Who is it for, and where will it be seen? Those two facts change the edit more than any style note.

A video for an existing audience can assume context and skip explanation. A video for cold viewers has about a second to justify itself. A video placed in a feed competes with everything else in that feed; a video embedded on a product page has already earned the click and can afford to be slower and more detailed.

Get the placement in writing, including the aspect ratio. Clients routinely ask for "a social video" and then place it somewhere that crops the top and bottom off. The safe zone rules in vertical safe zones apply to every delivery, and mentioning them in the brief prevents the argument later.

3. Examples, not adjectives

Three links, each with one sentence explaining what it is about the example that matters:

Like this one — the opening shot is the product in use, no talking until second four.

Adjectives describe taste. Examples describe decisions. A client who sends three links has told you more about their taste than a page of brand guidelines, and the accompanying sentence is what stops you copying the wrong thing about the reference.

Ask for examples of what they do not want too. One link to a style they hate is worth three they like, because it removes a whole direction in a single line.

4. Deliverables and specifications

A numbered list, with counts and specs:

• Two videos, nine by sixteen, fifteen to twenty seconds.
• One square version of the first, for a different placement.
• Captions burned in, plus an SRT file for the second.
• Delivered as MP4, H.264, at the platform's recommended bitrate.

Every ambiguity here becomes a revision. "A few versions" means the client expects four and you planned one. Write the count.

Export settings that survive platform recompression are covered in vertical export settings; the brief only needs to name the format, not re-explain it.

5. What is out of scope

This is the section clients skip and editors wish they had not. State what the price does not include:

• Extra aspect ratios beyond the list above.
• Script writing, if the client is supplying the message.
• Voiceover recording or on-camera talent.
• Music licensing beyond the platform's own library.
• Changes to the product footage itself.

Naming exclusions is not hostile. It is the reason you can say yes to the third request without renegotiating the whole job.

6. Approvals and dates

Who approves? One person, named, with a backup for when they are away. "The team will review" means nobody will, until the day before publication.

Then the dates: footage in hand, first cut, feedback due, final delivery. Feedback due is the load-bearing one, because an unlimited feedback window is the same as no schedule.

7. The brief you send back for signature

After the kickoff call, send back a one-page summary of what you understood and ask the client to confirm it. Not a contract — a confirmation.

This does three things. It catches misunderstandings while they cost nothing. It creates a shared record that ends "that is not what we asked for" arguments. And it makes the client read the scope, because they are signing it rather than skimming it.

A short example

A one-page brief for a small product client, compressed to what actually matters:

Goal: get cold viewers to the product page. Audience: people who have seen the product in a feed but never clicked. Placement: two feed placements, nine by sixteen, captions burned in. Examples: three links, each annotated with the one decision worth copying. Deliverables: two videos at fifteen to twenty seconds, plus a clean version and an SRT each. Out of scope: extra ratios, scriptwriting, voiceover, paid music. Dates: footage Monday, first cut Wednesday, notes Thursday, final Friday. Approver: one named person, plus a named backup, notes consolidated in one pass.

That is the whole document. It reads as terse because every line removes a question somebody would otherwise ask on Thursday.

When the client sends their own brief

Agency briefs and procurement documents are usually longer and contain less. Read them for four things: deliverable count, placement, approval chain, deadline. Everything else is context.

Then send back the one-page summary above, framed as confirmation: "Here is what I have taken from your brief." If their document contradicts itself — a duration that cannot carry the message, a ratio that does not match the placement, a deadline that precedes the footage — the summary is where to surface it, calmly, before the work starts.

Their brief also frequently omits exclusions entirely, which means everything is implicitly included. One question resolves that before it becomes an argument: "to confirm, the price covers the two videos and one revision round each?" Clients rarely mind the question. They mind discovering the boundary at delivery.

A single paragraph is enough: goal, audience, placement, deliverables, exclusions, dates, approver. If the client changes something later, the change is visible as a change, which is exactly what revision rounds depend on.