stop briefing in vibes.
"more energy" is not a creative brief. the brief sentence we banned, why it broke six shoots in a row, and the four-line replacement that gets us inside an editor's head before they cut.
"more energy" is not a brief. it is a complaint with a typo.
"vibes" briefs are a transfer of blame from writer to editor. we banned the worst offenders, replaced them with four mandatory lines, and shipped 22% faster across the next quarter. the brief is not where you express taste — it is where you prevent rework.
a brief that ends with "make it pop" is not a brief. it is a handoff of responsibility from the person who knows what they want to the person who is about to spend nine hours building something they will be told to redo.
we kept doing it anyway. for years. our briefs were full of the words "energy," "punchy," "elevated," "real," "authentic," "unhinged," and the worst one of all, "good." the editors would dutifully translate. sometimes the translation matched. mostly it didn't. we'd review, request changes, the editor would re-translate, and we'd ship the third or fourth pass at midnight.
— section onethe six broken shoots.
in q2 we tracked rework. six shoots in a row had at least two full re-edit cycles. the cost was real: about fourteen working days of editor time, plus the morale cost of cutting and re-cutting the same piece. all six briefs had something in common: they used one or more banned words, and none of them named what we were going to do with the post after it shipped.
the brief is not where you express taste. it is where you make sure the next person doesn't have to guess at it.
this is not a craft problem. this is an information-transfer problem. the editor cannot read your mind. when you write "more energy," you are asking them to perform mind-reading as a service. it is, mathematically, the most expensive line on the brief.
— section twothe four-line replacement.
- 01the reference. a link, a screenshot, an existing post. real, public, visible. not "something like the bumble ad from last year" — the actual bumble ad, with a timestamp.
- 02the verb. one verb that describes what we want the viewer to do in the first 1.5 seconds. stop. lean in. smile. laugh out loud. one verb.
- 03the trap. the thing the editor might do that would be wrong. the literal failure mode, written down. "do not let the music kick in before the line lands."
- 04the after. what happens to this post after it ships. is it a community-test, a paid-test, the start of a series. it changes the cut.
— section threewhat gets cut from the brief.
the corollary is what we no longer write. we deleted the "creative ambition" section. we deleted "mood." we deleted "tone of voice" except when there's a specific tonal pivot. we deleted the long brand-context preamble that the editor wasn't reading anyway.
the result, in numbers
three quarters in: 22% fewer re-edit cycles, ship time down by roughly a day per piece, editor-reported brief satisfaction up from a 3.1 to a 4.4 on our internal pulse. the briefs are now boring. the work is faster. these are correlated.
— closingthe word you can never use again.
here is a small commitment. delete the word "vibe" from every internal artifact you produce. don't replace it with a synonym. don't ladder up to "feel" or "energy" or "tone." sit with the silence. name the actual thing you want. it'll come out clumsy and specific and useful. that's the brief.
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