Student Author: Dillan Sant ’21
Ms. Jill Meyer ’95 spoke to the Marketing Club last week, presenting on the process of generating a creative brief. She engaged members with several intriguing ideas and examples of creative briefs in the marketing industry. By the end of the presentation, students had the knowledge and ability to produce creative briefs.
After graduating from one of the first classes of MICDS in 1995, Ms. Meyer studied at Duke University, where she obtained a major in marketing and a Marketing and Management Certification. She has since been working in marketing for over 20 years, including agency-side advertising, retail fashion brand marketing and communications, and consumer packaged goods brand management. Ms. Meyer has worked for Fallon Worldwide in Minneapolis, where she worked with client brands like Starbucks, Citibank, and Dyson, and she has marketed for Nordstrom Corporate in Seattle, where she focused on corporate branding and retail marketing. Now, Ms. Meyer is the Senior Brand Manager for the Nestle Purina Petcare Masterbrand and is a current MICDS parent.
Ms. Meyer began her presentation by showing members of the club an image of an orange and asking students to come up with ideas to market the orange. The group decided that the best ways to market an orange were to describe the great taste, healthiness, and simplicity of an orange. This example immersed the students into the presentation, and Ms. Meyer continued to use this example throughout, building on our ideas along the way.
Then, Ms. Meyer explained how one could convey these ideas with a creative brief, a document that outlines a brand or business challenge and assignment, inspiring an effective marketing communication or advertising output. Briefs are often written by the marketer (client) or account planner (agency), and then they are given to an agency creative team to implement. An effective creative brief is thorough yet concise and allows agencies to create an advertisement to market their brand. To create a brief, one must understand the background of the brand, the challenge it faces marketing-wise, and the objective of marketing the brand. In other words, what must be achieved through the marketing communication?
I found Ms. Meyer’s emphasis on the target audience of an advertisement to be most interesting. A target audience not only includes demographics but also psychographics, which are the interests and mindsets of the audience. In the past, I thought that targeted advertisements focused primarily on demographics, so it was very interesting to hear Ms. Meyer explain the importance of psychographics in the marketing world.
By the end of Ms. Meyer’s presentation, the members of the Marketing Club were equipped with the tools to write their own creative briefs. Ms. Meyer’s presentation on how to write a creative brief was intriguing and entertaining while also being quite informative. Thank you for virtually visiting our Marketing Club, Ms. Meyer!