How to brief an AI lab in three sentences

Every agency and lab has a brief template. Most of them are thirty fields long and ask for things like "tonal adjectives" and "competitive landscape" and "three to five success KPIs." We've filled in hundreds of them. We've also been in the rooms where they got filled in. The honest truth is that most of a good brief gets decided in the first ten minutes and most of a bad brief gets decided in the third meeting.

So we wrote a shorter one.

The three-sentence brief isn't a replacement for the thirty-field document. That document still exists — we still want your brand guidelines, your mandatories, your hero benefits, your channel mix, your production constraints. It's input. But the three sentences are the compass. Without them, the thirty-field document is a pile of ingredients with no recipe.

Sentence one: Who is this for?

Not the buyer persona. The buyer persona is a fiction invented by a planning department on a Thursday afternoon. It has a name and a stock photo and a set of hobbies and it doesn't exist.

The question we actually need answered is: who is the person who will share this? Who is the 24-year-old in Dubai or Jakarta or Lagos who sees this on a Tuesday night, screenshots it, and sends it to their group chat with "lol" or "👀" or nothing at all?

Because if we design for the buyer persona, we make something sensible. If we design for the person who *shares*, we make something alive. And in 2026, the only growth mechanic that compounds is the one that rides inside someone else's story.

Sentence two: What is the one thing they should feel?

One emotion. Pick hard. This is the sentence that kills bad briefs.

A bad brief says the audience should feel "trust and excitement and a sense of community and also a little bit aspirational and also the value proposition should be clear." That's six emotions, and creative work that tries to deliver six emotions delivers none.

A good brief says: "Envy. But the good kind — the 'I want to be in that room' kind, not the 'I resent this' kind." Or: "The calm of having finally figured it out." Or: "The specific kind of hunger that makes you order late-night food."

The more specific and weird the emotion, the easier the creative is to direct. Every decision — palette, casting, framing, music, pacing — can be held up to one emotion and asked: *does this deliver that?* If yes, keep. If no, cut.

Sentence three: What would make this embarrassing to post?

This one sounds negative. It's actually the most useful question in the whole process.

Every brand has a specific shape of embarrassment. For a premium fashion house, it's being seen as trying too hard. For a challenger consumer brand, it's being seen as smug. For a B2B software company, it's being seen as unserious. For a creator-led brand, it's being seen as corporate.

If you can describe your brand's specific embarrassment shape in one sentence, you've just ruled out about ninety percent of wrong creative directions. And — this is the part people miss — *everyone on your team already knows the answer*. They just don't get asked. Ask.

Why this works for an AI lab specifically

Generative pipelines are the most prompt-sensitive creative medium in the history of creative media. They are also the most prompt-indifferent medium, if you don't know what you're doing. Throw vague inputs in, get vague outputs out. Throw specific, opinionated inputs in, get specific, opinionated outputs out.

The three-sentence brief is the highest-density form of opinion we can hand to the pipeline before we start. It tells the director what feeling they are chasing, it tells the model what person they are rendering for, and it tells everyone involved what failure looks like before the first render happens.

What the thirty-field document is still for

Operations. Legal. Rights windows. Mandatories. Channel specs. Delivery dates. All the things that are boring to talk about but expensive to get wrong. Please fill those in — we genuinely need them and we will read them twice.

But when we walk into the studio to actually make the thing, we have the three sentences taped next to the monitor. That's the brief.