Planning fundamentals
Media brief
A media brief is the client document that defines what a campaign must achieve: the commercial objective, audience, markets, budget, timing, constraints and success measures. It is the primary input to a media plan, and its quality largely determines the quality of the plan.
In practice
Briefs arrive in every format: PDFs, decks, emails, Notion pages and conversations. The planner's first job is extraction - turning inconsistent documents into structured inputs before any money is split.
Missing inputs should be resolved, not assumed. A plan built on a guessed budget or an undefined conversion event will be rebuilt later at greater cost.