por Ber | Abr 9, 2026 | Uncategorized
The email arrives on a Tuesday. The project is going well. The direction is solid. You’ve had two great rounds of feedback and you can see the finish line from here.
Then: “I showed it to my nephew — he’s very creative, does a lot of stuff on his laptop — and he had some thoughts.”
Your stomach drops. Not because you can’t handle feedback. You’ve been handling feedback your entire career. You can handle “make the logo bigger” and “can we make it pop more” and “I know we said modern but actually can we go more classic but still modern.” You have developed an almost superhuman capacity for feedback.
But the nephew is different. The nephew is a category unto himself.
Who Is the Nephew, Really?
The nephew is not always a nephew. Sometimes it’s a spouse. Sometimes it’s a friend who “has an eye for these things.” Sometimes it’s an actual employee whose job title has nothing to do with design or marketing but who, in the client’s estimation, “gets it.”
What they all share is a specific combination: no professional context, no accountability for the outcome, and absolute confidence in their opinions.
This combination is lethal. The professional designer operates under constraints — strategy, brief, audience, brand guidelines, production requirements, budget, timeline. The nephew operates under no such constraints. The nephew looks at the work and thinks about what they personally like, untethered from any of the factors that produced the decisions they’re critiquing.
This is why the nephew’s feedback sounds like this: “I feel like it should be more vibrant.” “My friend said it looks too corporate.” “I think you should try a different font — something that feels more energetic but also calmer.” “What if you made it less… designed?”
Less designed. That’s a real note that has been given to a real designer. Someone paid money for that note to be delivered.
The Epistemology of Unsolicited Creative Opinions
Here’s the uncomfortable sociological fact: design is one of the few professional disciplines where external, unqualified opinions are routinely incorporated into the process as though they carry equivalent weight to professional judgment.
Nobody calls in their nephew to review the legal brief. Nobody asks a friend who “has a good eye for numbers” to weigh in on the audit. Nobody says to the surgeon, mid-procedure, “I showed this to my cousin, she watches a lot of medical dramas, here’s what she thinks you should do with the incision.”
But show someone a logo and suddenly everyone has jurisdiction. Design looks accessible because the surface output is visual, and everyone sees visual things, therefore everyone has valid opinions about visual things. The fifteen years of training, the strategic thinking, the hundreds of decisions embedded in a single design — these are invisible. What’s visible is the output, and the output invites commentary from anyone who has ever seen something.
Understanding this doesn’t make it less frustrating. But it contextualizes it. The nephew is not malicious. He genuinely doesn’t know that he doesn’t know.
Managing the Nephew Without Burning the Relationship
The worst response to the nephew situation is to fight the feedback directly. You will not win by explaining why the nephew is wrong. The client chose to show the work to the nephew, which means the client values the nephew’s opinion — at least enough to pass it along. Dismissing the nephew dismisses the client’s judgment in surfacing the feedback.
The better strategy is to address the underlying need. The client showed the work to the nephew because they wanted a second opinion. They’re unsure. They needed validation — and the nephew was the easiest available validator. Your job is not to defeat the nephew. Your job is to make the client not need the nephew.
This means investing in the presentation. Walk the client through the decisions. Not the execution — the decisions. Why this typeface and not another. Why this layout creates the hierarchy the brief requested. Why this color palette maps to the audience you defined together. Make the logic visible, so the client has language to defend the work themselves — to the nephew, to the board, to whoever else weighs in.
A client who understands why the work is right doesn’t need to show it to the nephew. Or if they do, they can explain why the nephew’s vibrance note misses the point.
When the Nephew Wins Anyway
Sometimes the nephew wins. The vibrant, energetic, calmer version gets made. The work becomes something you don’t want in your portfolio. This is a real outcome and it happens regularly.
When it does, your options are limited. You can walk away from the project (rarely practical). You can have a frank conversation about creative authority and professional standards (often useful, sometimes relationship-ending). Or you can make the best possible version of the thing you disagree with, document your recommendations clearly in writing, and chalk it up to the cost of doing business with humans.
The last option is not surrender. It’s craft. Even within constraints you didn’t choose, you can do good work. That’s actually the hardest skill in the profession — doing the best possible work inside a bad brief.
The nephew will not be in the room when the campaign underperforms. You will have the receipts. And sometimes that’s what the next pitch is built on.
If you’ve survived a nephew situation recently, you deserve something nice. NoBriefs makes things for people who work in the creative industry and have developed a rich inner life as a coping mechanism. The KPI Shark mug is particularly therapeutic to hold during feedback calls.
The nephew is not the last boss. He’s just a recurring enemy type. You’ve defeated him before.
por Ber | Abr 9, 2026 | Uncategorized
Close your eyes and think of a technology company. A financial institution. A healthcare brand. A social media platform. An airline. A consulting firm. A software company. A bank. A pharmaceutical giant.
Now open your eyes and ask yourself: what color were they?
You already know the answer. It was blue. It was always going to be blue. The six-figure branding engagement, the workshop with stakeholders, the three rounds of presentations, the color psychology rationale in the deck — all of it was always going to end in blue. The journey was just the scenic route to the inevitable destination.
This is not a coincidence. This is not a collective aesthetic preference. This is a system, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
The Blue Tax: What It Costs to Be Safe
Blue communicates trust. Reliability. Professionalism. Competence. This is real — the research broadly supports it. Blue has lower arousal properties than red or orange, meaning it doesn’t spike anxiety, which is useful if you’re a bank asking people to hand over their money or a hospital asking people to hand over their health.
But here’s the problem: when everything communicates trust, nothing does.
Blue has become the visual equivalent of saying “we’re committed to excellence.” It’s technically true of someone, somewhere. As a differentiator, it’s worthless. When Pepsi is blue and PayPal is blue and Ford is blue and Dell is blue and Facebook is blue and Samsung is blue and American Express is blue, “blue” no longer means “trustworthy.” It means “I didn’t want to make a decision.”
The blue tax is real and it compounds. Every new blue brand makes every other blue brand slightly more invisible. You’re not choosing the color of trust. You’re choosing the color of camouflage.
The Approval Committee and the Color of Least Resistance
Here’s where it gets structurally interesting. Most brand color decisions are not made by one person with a vision. They’re made by a committee with a budget.
Committees have a predictable relationship with risk. Individual committee members may personally love the deep rust orange that the agency proposed. They may privately agree that it’s distinctive, modern, and absolutely right for the brand. But then comes the moment when they have to say so out loud, in front of colleagues, and defend it to a CFO who is already skeptical of the entire branding investment.
Nobody ever got fired for choosing blue.
This is the fundamental dynamic. Bold color choices require someone to stick their neck out. Blue requires nothing. Blue is the color of institutional cover. If the rebrand fails, nobody can point to the color and say “this was a catastrophic creative mistake.” Blue is defensible. Blue is safe. Blue is the beige of the chromatic spectrum.
The agency often knows this. Some agencies have stopped fighting it. They present the bold options — the terracotta, the forest green, the unexpected yellow — because the brief asks for differentiation. They watch the committee squirm. And then they present the blue option, which they had prepared in advance, because they’ve done this before.
The Brands That Weren’t Blue (And What It Cost Them)
The brands that have genuinely built equity through unexpected color choices did so because someone, at some point, was willing to defend a decision that made a room uncomfortable.
Tiffany didn’t invent its blue accidentally — but it’s a very specific, trademarked, aggressively protected blue that functions as a completely different asset than “generic brand blue.” Hermès orange is one of the most recognizable colors in luxury. The red of a Coca-Cola can. The yellow of McDonald’s arches. The purple of Cadbury. The green of Starbucks.
What these colors have in common is not that they’re “better” colors. It’s that they were owned. Consistently. Aggressively. For decades. Color equity is built through commitment, not through choosing the statistically safest hue.
The irony is that choosing blue in hopes of conveying trustworthiness actually conveys nothing — because you blend into the blue ocean (pun very much intended) of every other brand that made the same calculation. The brands that actually feel trustworthy often feel that way because of consistency and specificity, not because they chose the right side of the color wheel.
A Modest Proposal for Your Next Rebrand
This is not a call to make every logo aggressively experimental. Not everything needs to be a chaotic gradient or a color that doesn’t technically exist in nature. Some brands should probably be blue. Surgeons’ scrubs are blue for a reason.
But before you land on blue, ask yourself one honest question: are we choosing this because it’s right for us, or because it’s safe for the room?
If the answer is the latter — if you’re choosing blue because nobody can get in trouble for choosing blue — then you’re not making a brand decision. You’re making a political decision dressed up as a brand decision. And you’ll spend the next decade wondering why nobody can tell you apart from your competitors.
The creative process demands more than that. Your audience deserves more than that. And frankly, the agency you hired deserves the chance to show you something they actually believe in.
Be brave enough to pick a color that makes the CFO slightly uncomfortable. That discomfort might be the most valuable thing in the room.
Speaking of things that make corporate rooms uncomfortable: the NoBriefs shop stocks a selection of items for the creatives who’ve been in one too many color approval meetings. The Fuck The Brief collection understands your pain at a cellular level.
You’re allowed to choose something other than blue. This has always been true.
por Ber | Abr 9, 2026 | Uncategorized
There’s a creative director somewhere right now, probably with 12 years of award-winning work, who cannot show you their portfolio. Not because it doesn’t exist. But because the case study for that campaign from 2021 isn’t quite written yet, the images need to be re-exported at a higher resolution, and they’re not sure the color of the background on slide 4 is sending the right message.
Meanwhile, a 23-year-old with a Canva account and three months of experience just landed a job at a dream agency because their portfolio was done.
This is the great creative tragedy of our time. Not AI. Not budget cuts. Not clients who want it “more punchy but also calmer.” It’s the portfolio that’s never quite ready to be seen.
The Mythology of the Perfect Portfolio
Somewhere along the way, the creative industry invented a story: your portfolio is you. Not just your work. You, your taste, your judgment, your entire professional soul, compressed into a website that must be simultaneously impressive and humble, specific and versatile, modern and timeless.
No pressure.
The result is that most creatives treat their portfolio the way some people treat going to the dentist — they know they should do it, they feel vaguely guilty every time they think about it, and they keep finding reasons to postpone it until the pain becomes unbearable.
The pain, in this case, is usually a layoff or a stagnating freelance pipeline. Funny how urgency materializes then.
The mythology runs deep. You need the right domain. The right template. The right balance of process shots and final results. You need to explain the brief (but not too much, because clients hate when you talk about the brief — unless they love it, it depends). You need testimonials, but only from important people. You need metrics, but only the ones that look impressive.
You need, in short, something that doesn’t exist.
What “Not Ready” Actually Means
Let’s be clinical about this. When a creative says their portfolio isn’t ready, there are usually one of four things happening:
One: The work is old. Old is relative. In some industries, showing work from 2019 is ancient history. In others, it’s still relevant. The real question is whether the work is good — and deep down, you know the answer.
Two: The work is embarrassing. Not because it’s bad, but because you’ve grown. You look at that brand identity you were proud of in 2020 and now you can see every wrong decision. This is called “getting better at your job” and it’s a good thing. A portfolio that makes you cringe a little is a portfolio that documents growth.
Three: The work belongs to someone else. Client confidentiality, NDAs, campaigns that were never launched. This is real. It’s also largely solvable with a password-protected section, a well-crafted case study that anonymizes the brand, or a simple conversation with the former client.
Four: You’re afraid. This one’s the hard one. Because if the portfolio is never done, it can never be rejected. You can always say “I’m updating it” and the failure state never arrives. It’s the creative equivalent of never sending the manuscript — if you never send it, it can never get rejected.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most “not ready” portfolios are actually fear wearing the costume of perfectionism.
The Opportunity Cost Nobody Talks About
Every month your portfolio exists in draft form is a month you’re invisible. The industry moves on word of mouth, yes — but word of mouth eventually leads someone to a URL. If that URL goes nowhere, or worse, leads to a Squarespace site last updated in 2018, you’ve just undermined the recommendation.
Consider what the portfolio-never-ready tax actually costs: the freelance opportunities you didn’t pursue because you didn’t want to be asked for your portfolio. The jobs you didn’t apply for because the application required a link. The collaborations that didn’t happen because someone checked your site and found nothing new.
Perfectionism is very expensive. Nobody talks about this. We romanticize it — the meticulous creative who refuses to show work that isn’t perfect. We don’t talk about the decade they spent invisible.
Meanwhile, the people who actually get hired are the ones who shipped something. Even something imperfect. Even something with a case study that could be better written, images that could be re-exported, and a background color on slide 4 that is, honestly, not quite right.
The Three-Day Portfolio Rule
Here’s a radical proposal: give yourself three days. Not three months. Three days to put together a version of your portfolio that shows your five best pieces with a paragraph of context each. No custom domain required. No perfect grid layout. No optimized page load times.
Three days. Done. Published. Shareable.
Then iterate. Add the case study later. Re-export the images when you have time. Fix the background color. But start from a published baseline, not from a theoretical ideal you’re working toward.
This is, incidentally, the same logic that applies to every other creative deliverable. The first version is never perfect. The tenth version might be. But you can only get to the tenth version by shipping the first one.
You know this. You’ve told clients this a hundred times. You’ve explained iterative processes and MVP thinking and why done is better than perfect. And then you go home and your portfolio is still in draft mode.
The irony would be funny if it weren’t so professionally costly.
Consider this your permission to ship the imperfect version. Your future clients won’t see what’s missing. They’ll see what’s there — and they’ll decide based on that. The portfolio that exists will always beat the portfolio that doesn’t.
And if you want something to put in that portfolio — something to remind yourself and others that you’ve got taste, nerve, and a functioning sense of humor — the NoBriefs shop has a few items that belong on the desk of someone who creates for a living. Consider it set dressing for the version of yourself you’re building.
Ship the portfolio. Then fix it. Not the other way around.
por Ber | Abr 8, 2026 | Uncategorized
Let’s start with the uncomfortable version of this conversation, since that’s the only one worth having. Generative AI can, right now, produce a competent marketing brief in thirty seconds. You give it the product, the target audience, and the objective, and it gives you a structured document with positioning, key messages, tone of voice guidance, mandatories, and success metrics. It will not be brilliant. It will not be surprising. But it will be adequate, and in an industry where “adequate” describes a significant percentage of briefs produced by humans at significant cost, that is a real disruption.
The question is not whether AI will write briefs. It is already writing briefs. The question is what that means for the people who write briefs for a living, and for the quality of the creative work that comes from those briefs.
What the Brief Actually Is
Before declaring the brief dead, it’s worth being precise about what the brief is. In the narrow definition: a document that communicates a specific task to a creative team, including context, objectives, audience, message, constraints, and success criteria. In this narrow definition, AI is already good at writing briefs and will get better.
But there is a broader definition of the brief that matters more: the brief as the distillation of strategic thinking. The act of writing a good brief requires, before any typing happens, a serious confrontation with the problem. What are we actually trying to achieve? Who are we trying to reach and what do we know about them that’s true and non-obvious? What is the one thing we need to communicate? What constraints are real and which are artificial? This confrontation — the thinking before the document — is where the actual strategic value lives.
AI can help organize the output of that thinking. It cannot, yet, do the thinking itself. It can generate briefs from inputs, but it cannot generate the quality of inputs that make a brief genuinely useful. That requires a human who has lived in a problem long enough to know what matters and what doesn’t.
The Already-Broken Brief
Here is the uncomfortable prior question: was the brief ever really doing the job we claimed it was doing? An honest assessment of the industry suggests the answer is: sometimes. The brief, in practice, has long been a mixed artifact. At its best, it is a strategic tool that focuses creative energy and prevents wasted effort. At its worst — which is more frequent — it is a bureaucratic requirement that gets filled out after the strategy has already been decided, with language that satisfies the template without providing meaningful guidance.
The briefs that AI will replace most easily are the bad ones. The ones written to check a box. The ones that could have been produced by filling in a template with industry-appropriate language and sensible defaults. These briefs were already failing the creative teams they were supposed to serve. If AI writes them faster and with less of the human’s time, nothing of real value is lost.
The briefs that AI cannot replace are the ones that contain genuinely specific, genuinely insightful human thinking about a specific problem. These are rarer than they should be. They require more time, more knowledge, and more intellectual honesty than the format typically allows for. And they will become the differentiator in a world where the adequate brief is free.
The Prompt as Brief
There is an irony worth noting: the rise of generative AI has created a new brief-like document — the prompt. And the quality of AI output, as every practitioner who has worked seriously with these tools knows, is almost entirely determined by the quality of the prompt. A vague prompt produces generic output. A specific, thoughtful, contextually rich prompt produces genuinely useful work.
In other words: the skills that make a good brief writer make a good prompt writer. The ability to specify clearly, to anticipate ambiguity, to describe constraints, to articulate what success looks like — these are the same skills, applied to a new interface. The brief is not going away. It is changing shape.
The professionals who will thrive in this transition are not the ones who resist AI tools or the ones who uncritically outsource their thinking to them. They are the ones who understand the brief as a thinking tool rather than a document template, and who bring that understanding to every interface — whether they’re briefing a team of humans, a creative AI, or some hybrid of both.
What Gets Lost If We Stop Thinking in Briefs
There is a risk worth naming. If AI handles the mechanical production of briefs, and if organizations interpret this as “we no longer need to think carefully before briefing,” the quality of creative output will decline — regardless of how sophisticated the AI doing the work is. Garbage in, garbage out. The constraint is not the document production; it was always the quality of thought behind the document.
The brief’s real function was never administrative. It was a forcing function for clarity. It made strategists ask: what do we actually want to say? It made marketers confront: who are we actually talking to? Removing the friction of document production does not remove the need for those confrontations. It just removes the occasion that was forcing them.
This is why at NoBriefs, Fuck The Brief has always meant: fuck the bad brief, the box-ticking brief, the brief-as-bureaucracy. Never fuck the thinking. The thinking is the job. The document is just how you prove you did it.
→ The brief of the future is twenty words of genuine clarity, not two pages of elegant vagueness. NoBriefs — sharpening the one tool that no AI can replace: the question behind the question.
por Ber | Abr 8, 2026 | Uncategorized
The timeline is almost poetic in its compression. Brand purpose arrived as a genuine intellectual contribution to marketing thought — roughly 2010-2015, with its philosophical roots in Jim Stengel’s research connecting brand ideals to business growth and Simon Sinek’s TED Talk providing the populist version. By 2018, every brand had a purpose. By 2020, every purpose sounded identical. By 2023, the backlash was institutional — campaigns were being criticized not for lacking purpose but for having it. A concept that began as a differentiator had become a liability. Fifteen years from idea to cliché, which in marketing terms is actually a fairly long run.
What Brand Purpose Was Supposed to Mean
The original argument was substantive. It went: brands that have a clear reason for existing beyond profit — a genuine contribution to people’s lives or to the world — tend to attract more loyal customers, more motivated employees, and better long-term business performance than brands that are purely transactional. The research supporting this was real, if overstated in the popularized versions.
The application was straightforward: identify why your brand exists in a way that goes beyond the product, articulate that purpose clearly, and let it guide decisions about what you make, who you partner with, how you communicate, and what causes you associate with. Done correctly, this produced genuinely distinctive brands with clear decision-making criteria. Patagonia. Dove (for a while). Lush. Organizations whose stated purpose was operationally connected to what they actually did.
The key word is “operationally.” The purpose had to be real — meaning it had to constrain behavior, not just decorate it.
How It Broke
What happened next was entirely predictable in retrospect and somehow still surprising when it occurred. Marketing departments, under pressure to show strategic depth and differentiation, adopted the language of purpose without the substance. The exercise became: find a social issue adjacent to your category, attach your brand to it, produce a campaign in the emotional register of a documentary short, and call the result a “purpose-driven initiative.”
This process was not cynical in all cases. Many of the people involved genuinely believed in what they were doing. The problem was structural: purpose was being used as a communication strategy rather than as a business strategy. It was positioned as a way to talk to consumers rather than a way to run the company. When purpose is a campaign rather than a conviction, it is vulnerable to the most obvious question: does your brand actually behave this way when it’s not being watched?
For most brands, the answer was: not particularly. Carbonated beverages do not become health-positive because the campaign features inspiring music and a diverse cast. Fossil fuel companies do not become environmentally responsible because they fund a tree-planting initiative. Fast fashion brands do not become sustainable because they launch a “conscious” sub-line that represents three percent of their volume while the other ninety-seven percent continues as before. The gap between stated purpose and operational reality was visible, and audiences — younger ones especially — developed an excellent sensor for it.
The Pepsi-Kendall Jenner Moment and Its Aftermath
The 2017 Pepsi ad featuring Kendall Jenner resolving a protest with a can of soda was not the cause of brand purpose’s decline. But it was the clearest symptom of where the concept had arrived. A real social movement — the protest — had been borrowed for brand purposes, stripped of its specific political content, and converted into a generic metaphor for unity and connection that happened to feature a carbonated beverage as the agent of change. The reaction was immediate, nearly universal, and for once, not wrong.
The Pepsi ad was memorable because it was spectacular in its misjudgment. But the underlying error — using social issues as brand territory without substantive commitment — was so widespread that it would be unfair to single out Pepsi. They just did it most visibly.
What the backlash produced, unfortunately, was not a return to substantive purpose-driven business. It produced a shift in tone — more hedged, more ironic, more aware of authenticity as a performance register — while the underlying dynamic remained essentially unchanged. Brands became more careful about how they expressed purpose. Most did not become more purposeful.
What Survives the Collapse
The organizations that built actual purpose — not as a campaign positioning but as an operational commitment — have largely survived the era with their credibility intact. Patagonia continues to donate a portion of profits, has sued the US government over public land policy, and most recently converted its ownership structure in a genuinely unusual act of institutional commitment to its stated values. Whatever you think of the politics, the behavior is consistent with the purpose. That consistency is what brand purpose was always supposed to mean.
For everyone else, the appropriate response to the ruins of the brand purpose era is not nihilism but precision. Don’t claim a purpose you can’t operationalize. Don’t attach to social issues because they’re culturally salient — attach to them because they are genuinely connected to what your business does and because you’re willing to constrain business decisions in service of the commitment. If you can’t do that, don’t use the word “purpose.” “We make excellent products for people who care about X” is a less inspiring sentence than “we exist to change X for the better,” but it is infinitely more defensible.
The Fuck The Brief philosophy applies here with particular force: the brief that says “we need to communicate our brand purpose” before the brand has a genuine purpose is asking for a beautiful lie. Write the honest version instead.
→ Purpose without behavior is just a font choice. NoBriefs — for brands and marketers who’ve decided to mean what they say.
por Ber | Abr 8, 2026 | Uncategorized
There was a time when “storytelling” in a business context was a useful idea. The insight — that humans process information most effectively when it’s organized narratively, that data embedded in a story is retained better than data presented as data — is empirically grounded. The application to marketing and communication made sense: instead of listing product features, show a person whose life is changed by the product. Instead of citing statistics, make the statistics into a character with a journey. Good advice. The problem, as with all good advice that enters the marketing industry, is what happened next.
The Colonization of a Word
At some point in the early 2010s — the exact date is lost to the archaeology of conference presentations — “storytelling” became the answer to every question about content, communication, and brand identity. What should our content strategy be? Storytelling. How do we differentiate our brand? Storytelling. Why isn’t our B2B marketing working? Not enough storytelling. What do we put in this slide about quarterly earnings? A story.
The word spread with the speed and indiscrimination of a virus encountering a population with no immunity. It appeared in agency credentials decks. It appeared in CMO job descriptions. It appeared in the LinkedIn bios of professionals who had never written a narrative sentence in their lives but had attended a workshop and were now, apparently, storytellers. It appeared in brand guidelines. It appeared in the description of services offered by consulting firms that help companies restructure their supply chains.
The supply chain consultants are still not telling stories, by the way. They are making decks about supply chains. But the decks now have a slide that uses the word “narrative.”
What “Storytelling” Now Means in Practice
When a client briefs an agency on “storytelling,” the instruction means approximately nothing specific. It may mean they want emotionally resonant content. It may mean they want a content series rather than individual posts. It may mean they want a brand origin myth. It may mean the CEO read a Seth Godin book over the weekend and wants to be exciting now. It may mean they saw a competitor’s campaign and liked the feeling of it without being able to specify why.
The word has been used to describe so many different things — content marketing, brand narrative, PR pitching, investor communications, user journey documentation, employee onboarding — that it no longer describes any of them usefully. When a brief says “we want to tell our brand story,” the creative team knows exactly as much as they did before reading it. Which is to say: nothing actionable.
This is the fate of words that become fashionable in industries that run on language. They get used until they’re smooth. “Innovation.” “Disruption.” “Authentic.” “Purpose-driven.” Each of these entered the marketing lexicon carrying real meaning and departed as meaningless decoration after approximately three years of conference panel overexposure. “Storytelling” was the same.
What Was Actually Good About the Original Idea
The underlying insight, stripped of the buzzword packaging, remains valid. Human beings are narrative creatures. We remember stories. We are moved by stories. We make sense of the world through stories. A brand that understands this and applies it with skill and discipline will communicate more effectively than one that doesn’t.
But applying it with skill and discipline requires actually understanding what a story is. Not a case study formatted as a journey. Not a video with a piano soundtrack and slow-motion footage of meaningful moments. An actual narrative structure: a protagonist with a specific problem, a genuine obstacle, a resolution that changes their situation in a concrete way. Most of what the marketing industry calls “storytelling” does not meet this definition. It is mood, or texture, or character illustration. These are fine things. They are not stories.
The word policed its own meaning by becoming too popular to mean anything. What the industry needs now is not a new buzzword to replace storytelling but a willingness to be specific about what it actually wants: emotional resonance, narrative structure, character development, situational specificity. Say those things. The brief will be better.
The Briefing Problem
The reason “storytelling” persists despite its emptiness is that it does something useful for the person writing the brief: it sounds aspirational without committing to anything specific. “We want storytelling” communicates a desired quality — something that feels human, connected, emotionally engaging — without requiring the brief-writer to specify what that means in concrete terms. It is aspirational hand-waving, and it is comfortable because it defers the hard work of definition to the creative team.
This is, in a very literal sense, what Fuck The Brief is about. Not a rejection of the brief as a document but a rejection of the brief as permission to be vague. A good brief makes the creative work easier, not harder. A brief that says “storytelling” without defining terms has made the creative work harder while giving everyone involved the illusion of having been helpful.
The word is not coming back. Not as a useful term of art, anyway. It has been used too many times, in too many directions, by too many people who were using it as a synonym for “not boring.” That’s fine. The concept it was pointing at — the power of narrative in human communication — survives perfectly well without it. Use that concept. Describe it precisely. Leave the word in the pitch deck graveyard where it belongs.
→ If your last brief contained the word “storytelling” without further specification: we’ve all been there. NoBriefs — where the brief comes to be honest with itself.
