Creative Brief

I used to think that if someone wants me to design something, I would just go straight to the design process. Creative brief we learned in class gives me a whole new perspective of design because it shows almost "everything" that goes into the design process so that client can actually "see" how his/her money is spend and what has been achieved. As Prof. Jimmy was talking about creative brief in class, I was thinking about bringing it to China.

In China, advertisement companies do not usually inform how money is actually spent and how such designed advertisement benefits their clients. A normal situation would be client signed contract with Ad companies then writes a check. As a matter of fact, people do not really care about "design." For example, real estate corporations nowadays are forced to pay excessive amount of tax if their properties are not sold out two years after they were built. That new law can easily cause panic among the boards of corporations. As a result, they want to advertise the "new houses" and try to target all kinds of audiences. Sometimes, they will even give out brand new cars to the first three people who buy their houses. For the advertisement, all they know is that advertisement will help the sales. That's basically all they know. They do not care about how certain designs can effectively promote sales but simply accept the fact that it is advertisement companies' jobs to figure out what should be "designed."

Sometimes, it gets even worse when advertisement is paid by the government for the purposes of promoting governmental interests, such as family planning, one child policy, and communism. Due to the government corruption, officials who in charge of dealing with advertisement company would most likely take some of the money into his/her own pocket. Those government assigned officials would only make sure that such ad would not affect the party's reputation and not a revolutionary spark. Besides that, all their concerns would be what is the actually cost and what amount should be written on "contract." 

If creative brief becomes common in a country such as China, maybe that would change how people think of design.