Lesson 1 of 3 · 4 min
What a project is
You can decide whether new work needs its own project or belongs in an existing one.
A project is a container for one brand or one product. It holds the things that stay true across everything you make for that brand: what the product is, who it is for, how it sounds, what it looks like.
Steps
- Create a project for one product or one brand.
- Fill in the product name and what it does, in plain language.
- Generate the same brief you used in the quick tools, but inside the project.
- Compare the two results.
The rule of thumb
New project when the brand changes. New campaign inside that project when the offer changes.
Agencies get this wrong in one direction and in-house teams get it wrong in the other. Agencies make one project and try to run four clients out of it, which means every client's context bleeds into the others. In-house teams make a new project per campaign, which means they set up the same brand five times and get five slightly different versions of it.
What to watch for
If you find yourself writing the same three sentences of background into every brief, that background belongs in the project, not in the brief.