Ad platforms are constantly changing and the number of options continues to grow. With the range of campaign objectives, audience options and creative formats it can be hard to plan or brief in campaigns.

If you’re too general (eg. I want a lead generation campaign on LinkedIn), there will probably be multiple rounds of back-and-forth between you, designers and other providers before a campaign is ready. If on the other hand you’re too specific, you can end up with heaps of documentation that generates micro-specific creative that might not need that level of detail (eg. do we really need to use 10+ banner sizes)?

To help our clients and with our own processes, we’ve created a campaign briefing doc, and we’re sharing it with you below. This is not suitable for all business verticals and campaign types but it presents our balance between the options that are available vs the ones that are typically best for most of our clients. This includes the most relevant creative specs for the major ad platforms.

You might notice we don’t start with creative. There is a lot at the start about the overall campaign strategy and objectives as we’ve found that this part is what’s most important to get right first. All ad platforms will allow you to do a lot of busy-work building a campaign that might not actually make an impact to your business – by spending more time on strategy you’re more likely to avoid this.

Feel free to use the Google Doc below for yourself – you can duplicate it and modify it as you see fit. You’ll note it also links out to a Google Sheet for ad copy – this has the character limits across platforms.

Hope you find this useful! Embed is below – note the embed may not render interactive elements like dropdowns properly. Scroll to the bottom of the post to click through to the actual Google Doc.