Creative Brief

A client fills an intake form, and a formatted Notion brief appears in the account team's queue with the client answers pre-slotted, the target audience mapped, and the key takeaway filled in by Claude. The account lead reviews, edits, signs off, and the brief attaches to the project before kickoff.

Most agencies lose two hours per engagement on brief formatting. The client writes three paragraphs, the strategist copies them into a Google Doc, adds brand colours, pastes competitor logos. Nothing strategic happens in those two hours. This template collapses the formatting into automation. The strategist spends those two hours thinking, not pasting.

Two databases. Intake holds the raw form submissions with client, form fields, and received timestamp. Briefs holds the formatted brief with brand context, target audience, key takeaway, and sign-off status. Views: Needs review, Signed off, Attached to project, Archived.

Tally or Typeform fires the intake. n8n maps fields to the Briefs database. Claude fills the target audience, key takeaway, and tone guidance from the intake answers using your saved brand voice page. The account lead gets a Slack ping. They edit in Notion, flip "signed off" to true, and the brief links itself to the project.

The first failure is Claude inventing details the client never mentioned. Fix: every Claude-generated field is prefixed "draft" until the account lead approves. The approval flip is manual.

The second failure is briefs that live in the database but never reach the project. Fix: a view flags briefs signed off more than 48 hours ago with no project link. The ops lead clears that view on Friday.