Better objectives, better briefs

(00:00) Introduction to Objectives in Marketing

Matt:
I’ll just give everyone a minute to join. Thank you for being on time. All right, let’s kick in. Good evening. Good morning. Good afternoon. Wherever you may be joining from. My name is Matt and I’m one of the co-founders of BetterBriefs and it is our pleasure to bring you this webinar on objectives.

Before I hand over to our panelists and their razor sharp minds—I’m looking forward to this—a quick word from our sponsors: BetterBriefs is an independent brief and advisory business. We train marketers and brands on how to get to sharper, more concise briefs and more impactful and effective ideas.

We also operate in every stage of that brief development process, so inputting into briefs and also helping idea and creative decision-making. Now in my days as an agency strategist, the objective section in the brief was the first area that I would look at. Well-set objectives really provide the backbone for the task at hand. They connect every part of the brief. If you look at the structure of the objectives, you can see how the target audience, the message—everything in a brief—is connected by those objectives.

Some housekeeping before we start: If you have any questions during the session, there is a function called the Q&A function. Don’t mistake it for the chat function. It’s different. So pop your questions in that Q&A function, and we’ll be sure to answer them towards the end of the session. But that’s enough from me. I’m going to hand you over to Pieter-Paul, the other co-founder of Better Briefs, and you’ll hear from me a little bit later on. Have a great session.

(03:13) The Importance of Objectives Across Industries

Pieter-Paul:
Thank you, Matt, and hello everyone. Super excited to have you all here today. My name is Pieter-Paul, and I’ll be the moderator today. Who cares about objectives? Well, turns out lots of us—yes, lots of us. You’re all here, you’re all here live, we’ve got lots of people registered for this event. And when we look at the interests from the companies that you’re from—B2B, B2C, from all over the world, non-for-profits, commercials, governments—this clearly is an important topic that attracts a lot of attention.

Now, we also know from the research that we’ve done—the first and largest global study into marketing briefs—that if there’s one element of the brief you need to get right, it is the objective section. And that is something that marketers say, but even more importantly, the brief recipients—the agencies—say it too. So that’s another reason why we should care about objectives.

And sometimes I like to go outside of the category. Let’s maybe do that here as well. When we look outside the world of marketing—say, the world of finance—objectives are super important. When we look at the world of architecture, the brief and the objective you give to the architect is super important. In the world of engineering, setting clear objectives is super important. And maybe lastly, on a heavier topic, there are a fair few conflicts around the world, so when you look at the defence forces, and the objective they set to the soldiers, those are all very important.

So objective setting is a super important topic, not just in the world of marketing, but in lots of different categories.

(06:05) Creative Perspectives on Objectives in Sports Sponsorship

Pieter-Paul:
I’m going to introduce you to our two panelists. First up is Lizzie Hammer—no, no, Hammer. I’ve practiced it 10 times today! I’m really excited to have her because she’s an executive creative director and a pretty amazing one. The Drum has called her one of the world’s most creative women; she’s co-authored the book Creative Superpowers. Lizzie and I met at the APAC Effies—I had never been in Singapore, walked into a room with a bunch of people I never knew, and she took me under her wings and she was super, super nice.

One of the key reasons why we’ve invited Lizzie is that she brings a world of thinking and experience from a part of marketing that many of us are probably not too familiar with—sports and entertainment, sponsorship, big ideas in sports, fans, bringing that to life. That’s quite far away from the typical FMCG or banking or government briefs that most of us know. So, a warm welcome to you, Lizzie.

And then we also have Robert Britton. He’s a marketing effectiveness expert extraordinaire—not just a normal one, a special one. He has authored a lot of studies on marketing effectiveness, co-authored with some absolute industry superstars like Peter Field and Karen Nelson-Field. And no, they’re not related! Rob is now an independent marketing consultant, but in his previous life as a marketer, he was leading marketing effectiveness at ANZ Banking Group, so that brings in a bit of the world of finance, plus his time at Mondelēz International for the FMCG side of things. Welcome, Rob.

Let’s get started. I’m going to start with you, Lizzie. You’re from a world that is so far away from maybe the world that most of us work in. Let’s start there. The world of sports, sponsorship, entertainment—when you start a project, when a brief lands on your desk and objectives and a picture of success are being discussed, how does that all work? What kind of objectives come your way? How do you, as a creative, want to get clear on that picture of success? Can you give us some examples?

(09:10) Challenges in Setting Objectives for Marketing

Lizzie:
Yes, definitely. Lovely to be here. Thank you very much for the introduction. I do work in the world of sport and entertainment. I’m very fortunate to work on some of the biggest properties as well. We’ve just finished the Olympics and Paralympics in France. Rugby World Cup—women are playing in the UK next year, which we’re very excited about. And then I sit around the work that gets done with the Liverpool Football Clubs and the FIFA Women’s World Cup that was in Australia.

It’s a fantastic world to be in; sports fans are just bonkers. They are dedicated to their teams, and there’s also this beautiful levelling that happens when you watch sport. You can be a CEO, a janitor, and everything in between, from every background—if you all team up for that 90 minutes, you’re all shouting in the same direction. You become united.

Sponsorship used to be the CEO’s prerogative—choose the sport they love, it was all about media buys and visibility. These days, modern sponsorship sits much more around brand perceptions and brand behaviors. There’s a great phrase—it’s “for people like me.” Identity connection. That’s the bit we often play in. Ideally, we start to look at briefs that challenge us on how the brand turns up, what their current perceptions are, and how we can change that for them.

(11:57) The Role of Effectiveness in Marketing Briefs

Lizzie (continuing):
Toyota is a great example, if you want one. Toyota sponsors the Olympics and Paralympics and they took on an eight-year partnership. The reason they did that was to change how they’re seen: not just a car company but a mobility company. They’re branching out, diversifying. Their main sponsorship is around the Paralympics—if you can see the world through these amazing athletes and the awesome displays on an elite level, then you start to understand how possible it is for everyone to benefit from movement.

For Toyota, they actually used the partnership in a major way to talk to employees and franchisees, teaching their employee base about the shift from a car company to a mobility company. The part we worked closely on was internal engagement—how we talk to employees around the world for the couple of years leading up to the Paris Games, how we incentivise that, how we educate them, all that.

(14:49) Long-Term vs Short-Term Objectives

Rob:
Lovely to be here. If I reflect back on my days at ANZ—well, they still sponsor the Australian Open—although I think their logo might be smaller now—it was incredibly difficult to measure effectiveness around that. Tennis didn’t sell an awful lot of home loans. It was also very expensive, and measuring a direct impact was always tough. Some aspects were about entertaining big institutional clients, so that was valuable. But overall, I’d say it was relatively immature in terms of how it was approached compared to what Lizzie describes with Toyota.

When you start to talk about effectiveness, they definitely wanted measurement, but they didn’t necessarily want to involve me at that early stage to set proper objectives. They were in a rush, so I often swam further upstream to build knowledge around brand growth principles, to try and de-risk stupid decisions from being made in marketing plans down the line.

(17:47) Measuring Success in Sponsorships

Rob (continuing):
Effectiveness should come in way before you write a brief. We need a measurement framework for the broader strategy, not just the advertising. Sponsorship is a good example: it’s often a massive investment, and if the business doesn’t understand the relationship between that investment and its overall objectives—like how it actually delivers a return—then you’re on shaky ground.

(21:04) The Interplay of Objectives and Creative Solutions

Lizzie:
Sponsorships tend to be huge investments. At Octagon, we’ll look at a portfolio. Sometimes one major sponsorship isn’t all you need; you might want multiple that speak to different audiences—like the Australian Open and a football team at the same time—because they have different objectives. That’s the holistic piece we look at. Then we consider how the brand can show up meaningfully to fans of those events, cultural impact, and how fans relate to the property.

Measuring success is challenging: you need a multitude of KPIs because fans engage in many different ways. But you really have to identify what is the brand’s role in that world. For instance, if MasterCard is going to invest in grassroots women’s sports, how does that brand tangibly affect that space? A lot of strategy work goes into clarifying the brand’s role before we brief creative.

(23:54) The Language of Business in Marketing

Rob:
I love hearing Lizzie talk about this. It shows how sponsorship can be used in sophisticated ways. Many businesses, though, are less mature in how they approach these long-term partnerships. Sometimes they just want a quick fix—“did it sell more units this quarter?”—without anchoring to a broader brand strategy.

Lizzie:
I’m an unusual creative—I love the business side and speak the language of finance a bit. I actually completed an MBA, focusing on creativity in business. A lot of that was so I could communicate more effectively with CEOs, CFOs, and so on. Marketing has to do a better job speaking that language.

(27:09) Overcoming Challenges in Objective Setting

Lizzie (continuing):
We need to speak in ways everyone can understand. Sometimes marketers default to acronyms and fluffy words that nobody outside of marketing gets. A couple of techniques we use: one is a “pre-mortem”—like a post-mortem, but we do it before the project begins. We gather the strategy team and sometimes clients. We predict our biggest possible failure and work backward to avoid it. For me, the biggest failure is producing a vanilla, ignorable piece of creative that nobody notices. Did we set the right objective if that’s what happened? Probably not.

(29:46) Conclusion and Future Directions for Marketing Objectives

Lizzie (continuing):
We have to measure results to secure funds for next time. If you can’t point to outcomes from the last two or five years, good luck proving ROI for the next one. Once you can demonstrate impact, you can get longer-term sponsorship deals and bigger ideas.

Rob:
From an effectiveness perspective, it’s so powerful to have that longer-term commitment. Multi-year efforts blow the doors off in terms of results. But it all starts with proper objectives that you can measure and a clear sense of how the investment links to growth or brand results.

(33:15) Practical Approaches to Pre-Mortems

Lizzie:
As I said, a pre-mortem is basically getting the right people in the room—strategists, creatives, people from the brand—and saying, “Okay, if we imagine this has failed miserably, why did it fail? What went wrong? What does failure look like?” Then we plan how to avoid that. Often we find brand teams fear people won’t notice the work, or internal teams will get bored halfway through a long-term campaign. We also look at potential PR disasters. All of that helps clarify or tighten objectives.

(36:04) The Importance of Stakeholder Management

Lizzie (continuing):
Sponsorship projects often have two clients—the brand and the sports property, like a football club. Both need to approve how you activate and show up, so stakeholder management is huge. Doing that pre-mortem can help clarify roles, objectives, and success criteria for both parties.

(39:40) Understanding Marketing Effectiveness

Rob:
When we talk about measurement, a lot of marketers say they want brand metrics or they want revenue metrics, but they skip the behavioral metrics in the middle. Every action begins with a shift in memory—like brand consideration—and that shift then shows up in real-world business data. We need a framework that ties it all together: which levers are we pulling in advertising, how do they influence memory, how does that memory shift show up in demand signals inside the business, and how does that demand ultimately generate revenue or margin?

(44:31) Building Trust Through Sports

Lizzie:
I’m part of an organisation called “No Second Place,” which uses sports to impact Australian society, and you can’t do it overnight—it’s long term. There’s an element of awareness, education, action. Sports is a trusted space. Fans often welcome brand involvement if it helps them get closer to what they love. And in a fragmented world, live sports can unite people. That’s why it’s so powerful when done correctly.

(47:41) Navigating Briefs Without Clear Objectives

Matt:
We see so many briefs that lack clear objectives. We see that 98% of ideas might be getting ignored because there’s no defined business or behaviour shift. There’s so much money being set on fire.

Lizzie:
Yes, definitely. Bring us into the conversation and do a pre-mortem with us.

Rob:
Sometimes all it takes is slowing down and thinking: “Are we going to be able to prove this was worthwhile?” If you can’t measure it, how will you defend it to a CFO or a CEO?

(54:09) The Role of Language in Objectives

Lizzie:
Language alignment is massive. One Toyota client actually gave us a “Toyotapedia” so we’d know their terms. It’s basically, “Welcome to Toyota—here’s how we speak. Here’s the vocabulary you’ll see.” If an objective is to connect with a certain audience, or shift a perception about mobility, we all need to use the same language. It’s so important for creatives, too, so that we’re not guessing or getting stuck in acronyms.

(01:00:09) Utilising Pre-Mortems for Team Building

Lizzie:
A pre-mortem is a great conversation and a great team-building exercise. We’re all remote too often, so if you can get everyone in the room to talk about success and then talk about disaster scenarios—like, “What if we created something that people hated or ignored?”—it reveals real fears. That helps us craft better objectives so we don’t go down those paths.

(01:01:21) Addressing Staff Turnover in Marketing Teams

Lizzie:
Staff turnover is real—especially on long sponsorships like eight- or ten-year deals. Some companies rotate marketers to different departments. That can mean everyone you started with is gone. The trick is building a “mission-based” project that’s bigger than any individual, so the next team can’t just undo everything. If the mission is well-defined and the objectives and measurements are documented, the new folks simply continue the legacy, rather than start from scratch.

Matt:
Amazing. Thank you all. This has been wonderful and truly enlightening. We could talk for hours, but we’ll wrap it here. Thank you to everyone who joined live and those who watch on demand. Please check out upcoming courses at academy.betterbriefs.com and feel free to email us. Thanks again to Lizzie, Rob, and Pieter-Paul, and have a great rest of your day.