5 Questions to Ask Before Starting Your Next Creative Project

As my team begins our 2026 planning, I've been doing a LOT of thinking around what makes creative good creative. It's so easy to move too fast, get sucked into the day-to-day, and ultimately forget to write a good brief, frustrating creatives, and leaving us to wonder later why the work didn't land.

With that and mind (and after an insightful open-ended session with our design team, I summed up what I think really high-performing (and just plain great) creative needs before it starts.

To make it easy to put into practice, check through these five questions to help you pressure-test your next initiative before your team opens illustrator or writes a line of copy.

1. What do we want the audience to think, feel, and do?

It’s not enough to say “drive awareness” or “increase engagement.” What do you actually want to change in your audience?

Think: What's the ONE thing we want them to know after seeing this? apply some discipline here for better results.

Feel: What feeling do we want them to have? inspired, smart, clever, moved - get specific. think about what keeps them up at night so you really can solve their problem with your solution at the next step.

Do: What specific action should they take? desire to learn more, keep reading, click the button? Reach out for a demo? Think of the next logical action and get them there.

When teams skip this step, creative is working off of incomplete information and you end up with content that looks nice but doesn’t move anyone. Remember you're trying to inspire your creatives as much as your audience.

Example: Let’s say you’re launching a new B2B platform. “Generate leads” isn’t a creative direction. But saying our audience is passionate start-up tech entrepreneurs who are looking to cut the workload because they are STRAPPED and WORN DOWN with all it takes to run a business. We want them to be super curious about [product] and want to learn more (i.e. click on the link to download the white paper). That’s a brief.

Tip: Put this question at the top of every creative brief. Make sure your marketing and creative leads can answer it succinctly before moving forward.

1b. Who’s this really for — and what’s keeping them up at night?

More on audience because if you're talking to everyone you're talking to no one. Marketers say “know your audience” so often it’s become white noise. But most briefs still describe audiences as demographics, not humans.

“Women 25–40 interested in wellness” isn’t an audience — it’s a data point. Try this instead: “A working mom who’s done pretending she has time for 10-step skincare routines and wants a simpler way to feel in control again.” Get specific.

That version? Your designer will picture her. Your copywriter will write for her. Your strategist will build empathy, not assumptions.

Ask:

• What’s their context right now?

• What problem do they think they have vs. the one we solve?

• Why haven’t they solved it yet?

When you know what keeps them up at night, your creative becomes specific — and specificity sells.

Harvard Business Review: Empathy-driven marketing

3. What does success *look like and feel like?

Marketing teams are trained to live and die by the metrics.

Yes, you need KPIs. But KPIs are just signals. Reaching a KPI shouldn't be your end goal. Zoom out a bit and think really about what success looks like.

Example: Success looks like generating genuine interest in our product, as indicated by engagement and link clicks).

A 10,000 foot view typically helps the team understand context, think more humanly, get out of the day to day, and identify the proper motivation behind the KPI.

4. What guardrails will protect creative energy?

And of course - nothing flows without proper process. Creative teams will reach burnout VERY fast if you let ambiguity thrive.

Before you brief, ask:

• Where will collaboration happen? Slack, Asana, google docs?

• Who decides what’s “final”? Nothing worse than delivering a "final" file followed by another piece of feedback from another stakeholder.

• How do we handle feedback? Do you want all stakeholders in every round? do you want them to hop in on round 2? Identify what works for your specific brand's needs.

Don't be afraid to have conversations to clarify some common painpoints.

• What to do if you send a project going off the rails?

• What to do if you are getting conflicting feedback (hint, it’s usually due to a lack of clarity in the end goal)

It sounds small, but it’s the difference between focused momentum and death-by-draft. Don’t kill your creatives and make spend endless hours sussing out what feedback means.

5. What will we learn from this even if it fails?

Every project teaches you something: about your team, your audience, your process. But only if you plan to look for it.

Before you start, decide:

• What are we testing or validating here?

• How will we capture lessons learned?

• Who’s responsible for documenting it?

High-performing teams do short retros. They don’t wait until the end of the quarter. They ask: “What worked? What didn’t? What do we do differently next time?”

When you make learning part of the workflow, you scale your process and insights, not just execution.

Example: After a campaign, instead of just reporting “CTR improved 15%,” dig deeper: What messaging resonated best? Why? Did the audience respond to emotion or proof? That’s what sharpens the next brief. Go through creative, messaging, execution, process, and results.

Failure isn’t fatal if you learn from it. But repeating mistakes because no one reflected on the insights? That’s wasteful.

Key Takeaways

• Define impact first. What do you want your audience to think, feel, and do?

• Design success. Clarity and alignment are as important as metrics.

• Humanize your audience. Write briefs for real people, not personas.

• Protect creative focus. Clear guardrails beat endless approvals.

• Learn and optimize quickly. Treat every project as data for the next one.