The brief behind the brief
Clients ask for a video the way patients ask for a specific pill. The job is diagnosing what the ask is for.
A client who asks for “a brand video” is almost never asking for a video. They’re asking for the thing they believe a video will cause — more inbound, a better close rate, a board that stops asking about the website. The deliverable is a guess at a treatment; the condition is upstream.
The most useful twenty minutes of any project happens before scope is agreed: asking what has to be true in six months for this to have been worth it. The answers are rarely about the deliverable. That’s the honest version of “strategy” — refusing to price the pill before hearing the symptoms.
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