Most agencies write a brief after they've signed the deal. We write the brief before. The brief is how we price. The brief is also how the client knows we understand the assignment well enough to charge what we charge.
A luxury brand engagement at the $50,000 mark — where we sit most of the time at Embrace — isn't a retainer for “social media” or “creative.” It's a six-to-twelve-week sprint with a single, named outcome. The first conversation determines whether that outcome is real, real-but-fuzzy, or imagined. Here are the seven questions I ask before we send the proposal.
1. What did your last campaign cost, and what did it produce?
The most useful question in any kickoff. Not because I want to compare our pricing to the last vendor's — I don't. Because the answer tells me whether the founder thinks of marketing as investment or as line item. If the answer is “I don't know,” we have a measurement problem before we have a creative problem, and the price gets adjusted accordingly.
2. Who is the third buyer?
The first buyer of a luxury campaign is the founder. The second buyer is whoever signs the check (sometimes the same person, often not). The third buyer is the audience the campaign is actually for. Most kickoffs collapse the third buyer into the first two, which is how campaigns end up being optimized for the founder's taste rather than the customer's behavior.
I ask this question early because it tests whether the brand has done audience work or whether they've been operating on intuition. Both can produce great campaigns. The price is different.
3. What's the room you're trying to be in?
Every premium brand has a target room — physically or culturally. The Aman lobby. The Kering boardroom. The Met Gala. The Architectural Digest spread. The room the brand is trying to be in is more useful than the metric the brand says it's trying to hit, because rooms are concrete. We can shoot a campaign that gets you into the room. We cannot shoot a campaign that hits a $5M ARR target — the campaign is one input among many.
The room the brand is trying to be in is more useful than the metric the brand says it's trying to hit, because rooms are concrete.
4. What is the one sentence the customer should be able to say about you after this?
Not the slogan. The unprompted recall. If the campaign works, your ideal customer should be able to describe you to a friend at dinner in a single sentence. That sentence is the brief. If the founder can't write that sentence in their own words, the engagement starts with positioning, not creative — which is a different scope and a different price.
5. What's the brand's relationship to time?
Luxury brands have wildly different relationships with time. A heritage Swiss watchmaker is selling a 200-year story. A Telfar drop is selling a four-hour window. A boutique hotel is selling a Tuesday night in November. The cadence of the brand determines whether we're building campaigns or building a content engine. Campaigns are project priced. Engines are retainer priced. The gap between them is roughly $40,000.
6. Who else is in the room when this gets approved?
The fastest way to lose a luxury engagement is to design the work for the founder and present it to a board. Or design it for a board and present it to a creative director. The number of approvers doesn't just slow the project — it changes what the project should be. A tight three-person approval lane lets us go places a seven-person committee can't go. Both are legitimate. They're not the same engagement.
7. What does success look like the day after we ship?
Final question, and the one that tells me whether we should work together. If the answer is a feeling — “people will finally get us” — we have a positioning conversation to have first. If the answer is a behavior — “the right kind of buyer will DM us” — we can build to that. If the answer is a number — “30 inquiries in the first week” — we can build to that too, but the campaign now has to include a measurement layer that adds about 15% to the budget and is worth every dollar of it.
What this looks like on a brief.
All seven answers fit on one page. That page becomes the cover of the proposal. The remaining 11 pages are tactical: scope, deliverables, timeline, team, dependencies, IP terms, payment milestones, kill-fee structure, escalation paths, and a signature line. The cover page is where the work actually starts. The cover page is also why the price is what it is.
The agencies winning premium retainers right now aren't winning on creative reels. They're winning on briefs. Founders read your brief and decide, in eight minutes, whether you understood the assignment. The reel is what gets you in the room. The brief is what closes the room.
— D.C.
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