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This page is a workbook. Fill in each section, and open a section’s “Concept review” dropdown if you want the thinking behind it before you answer. You can complete the whole brief without opening one. Grayed E.g. text is an example to delete. Every example on this page uses one invented company, Doughnut Labs, a SaaS business that sells disruptive Doughnut Technology, so you can see one brief taking shape rather than scattered fragments.
Fill in the required core first. Add the optional sections only where they’d change what gets written. Link brand and campaign documents in Part 3 instead of retyping them here.
1

Fill in the required core

Objective, customer profile, message, voice and mandatories, channels, and success criteria.
2

Add the optional sections that apply

Hook direction, objections, and localization only earn a place when they’d change what gets written.
3

Link supporting material and file finished copy

Point to the brand and channel documents the writer needs, then link each piece of finished copy as it’s approved.

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Setup

The owner is accountable for this piece of copy end to end; the writer is whoever’s drafting it, and on a small team those can be the same person. Keeping the fields separate matters once they’re not.The campaign and creative brief links are what keep this piece of copy from reading as a standalone document. They place it inside the job it’s actually part of, so a reader can trace it back to the strategy and the visual direction it has to sit alongside.

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1. Objective and reader action

Fill in all three so a business number never lands on a writer’s desk as if it were direction:
The business goal is the commercial result. The communication objective is what this specific piece of copy has to change in the reader’s head. The reader action is the concrete thing you want them to do once they’ve read, watched, or heard it.Collapsing these into one line usually loses the part a writer can act on. “Increase trials” doesn’t tell anyone what to write; “reads the subject line and opens the email” does.

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2. Customer profile and insight

Link the customer profile this copy speaks to, and name the one thing about how they think that should steer the writing:
Pulling the profile from the shared library, instead of redescribing it here, keeps this brief consistent with every other piece of copy written for the same person.The insight is what turns a job title or age range into something a writer can push against. Knowing someone’s role tells you where to run the ad; knowing what they currently believe tells you what the first sentence has to overcome.

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3. Key message and proof

State the one idea the reader should take away, and the reasons they should believe it: Core message: E.g. Doughnut Labs gets you live in a day, not a quarter, and you can prove it before you pay a cent. Supporting proof:
  • E.g. Guided 4-step setup, no sales call required
  • E.g. Median time-to-first-ship under 3 hours
  • E.g. 2,000+ teams live
  • [add proof point]
This message should come from the campaign brief’s messaging, not get reinvented for this one piece. When two assets in the same campaign carry two different “most important” messages, the campaign stops reading like one campaign.Proof is what makes the message credible instead of just asserted. A number, a specific mechanism, a demonstration, or a customer’s own words all do more work than an adjective.

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4. Voice, tone, and mandatories

Link the brand voice and tone workbook and note the part that applies to this piece, rather than describing the voice again here: Must include:
  • E.g. “Start free trial” CTA, exact wording
  • E.g. Required legal line on the pricing claim
  • [add requirement]
Must not include:
  • E.g. “Instant” or “zero effort” claims we can’t support
  • E.g. Competitor names
  • [add restriction]
Elements that must appear in every serve, and how that is guaranteed:
Formats that assemble their own combinations, responsive search ads and Performance Max among them, can leave any individual asset out of a given serve. A required line listed under “must include” is not actually guaranteed unless the third column says how. See conditions have to survive the format.
Voice and tone rules live in one place, the linked workbook, so a writer isn’t working from a version that’s quietly drifted from the source. This section’s job is only to point at the part of that document that matters for this piece.Splitting mandatories into what must appear and what must never appear does the same thing for requirements that voice does for tone: it separates what’s fixed from what’s a style choice, so a required legal line never gets treated as negotiable just because it’s sitting next to a preference.The third column exists because “must include” quietly stopped meaning what it used to. In a fixed-layout ad, writing a line into the brief put it on the page. In a format that mixes assets per auction, it only puts the line in the pool that might be shown. The mechanism that closes that gap differs by format, and naming it here is what stops an approved condition from being met on paper and missed in the ad.

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5. Channels and deliverables

List every channel this copy has to run on. Each one hands off to its own template, which is where the character limits and field structure live:
The same message needs a different shape on every channel: a different length, a different structure, a different idea of what counts as the call to action. Listing every channel this copy runs on is what stops a version written for one from getting reused unchanged on another.This table doesn’t repeat each channel’s character limits, since the linked template already carries them and a second copy would just be one more place for the numbers to go stale. Its job is only to say which channels apply and route the writer to the right starting point.

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6. Success criteria

Define both. Fill the type that applies: Copy acceptance (is the writing itself right?):
  • E.g. Uses the approved CTA wording exactly
  • E.g. Fits every channel’s character limits
  • E.g. Matches brand voice section 4
  • [add criterion]
Campaign performance (did it do its job?):
  • E.g. Email click-through above 3%
  • E.g. Meta CTR above 1.2%
  • [add metric]
Copy acceptance asks whether the writing is right on its own terms: on-brand, within limits, carrying the required elements. Campaign performance asks whether it moved a number once it ran.Both belong here even if the writer isn’t accountable for the performance number, because knowing what’s being measured changes what gets written. A writer who knows click-through is the bar will write a different subject line than one who was only told to sound on-brand.

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Part 2: Optional sections

Add a section here only when it would change what gets written. A section that wouldn’t change a word adds length without direction.

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Hook and opening line direction

Optional: include when the reader’s attention has to be earned before anything else gets read, such as a paid social ad, an email subject line, or the first seconds of a video script.
What should the first line, subject, or opening moment do? E.g. Open with the specific objection (“Setup looks like it’ll eat a week”) rather than opening with the product name.
A hook is judged by whether it earns the next line, not by whether it’s clever on its own. Naming the job it should do (open a curiosity gap, name a pain point, state a specific promise) gives a writer something more precise to aim at than “make it punchy.”What earns attention varies by channel and by reader. A cold paid-social scroll and a subject line in an inbox someone already trusts are different problems, which is why this section exists separately from the channel table above rather than being folded into it.

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Objections the copy must answer

Optional: include when the reader is likely to hesitate before taking the action named in section 1.
What might make the reader hesitate, and how does the copy answer it?
Listing the doubt next to its answer turns a vague instruction like “make it persuasive” into work a writer can actually do. Which objections matter depends on the reader and the channel: a warm email list and a cold search ad usually carry different doubts.Not every piece of copy needs this section. A short brand-awareness line with no direct ask may not be answering an objection at all.

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Localization and reading level

Optional: include when the copy runs across regions, languages, or needs to hold to a specific reading level.
What localization or reading-level requirements apply? E.g. Localize for UK and Canada. Allow roughly 30% text expansion for the German version. Keep support-adjacent copy around a grade 6 reading level.
A character limit that fits comfortably in English can overflow once a line is translated, and a headline that reads clearly at one reading level can lose part of its audience at another. Naming these requirements before drafting starts lets a writer build around them instead of cutting a translated line down after the fact.This matters most for copy that’s public-facing or reaches a broad or international reader. A single internal email to an English-speaking team may not need this section at all.
Link out to your brand system and channel templates here instead of retyping them. Fill in a link for every document the writer needs, and mark any that don’t apply.
Brand system links: Channel copy templates:

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Finished copy

Link the approved, final copy for each channel as it lands. This fills in while the work happens, not at planning time:
This is where the approved version of each channel’s copy ends up, separate from the brief that specified it, so anyone looking for the current version can find it without digging through drafts.An empty row here on copy that’s supposedly already running is a signal worth chasing down, not a paperwork gap to ignore.

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Build order recap

1

Core is complete

Objective, customer profile and insight, message and proof, voice and mandatories, channels, and success criteria are filled in.
2

Only relevant optional sections are included

Hook direction, objections, and localization each earn their place by changing what gets written.
3

Brand system and templates are linked, not retyped

Part 3 links every document the writer needs, and the channel table routes to the right template for each format.
Last modified on August 10, 2026