How-To
The quality of a brand commercial is often decided before a single frame is shot — in the brief. A clear, well-structured brief gets you a sharper concept, an accurate quote, and a final piece that actually does what you need. A vague one gets you guesswork, padded estimates, and revisions. If you're a marketing or brand leader commissioning a commercial, here's how to brief a production company so you get the result you're paying for.
We've taken briefs from brands of every size for over 45 years. This is what separates the briefs that lead to great work from the ones that lead to friction.
The most common mistake is leading with "we want a 30-second video." Lead instead with what the commercial needs to accomplish: drive awareness, launch a product, shift perception, support a campaign, convert on a landing page. The goal dictates everything downstream — length, tone, where it runs, and how success is measured. A good production partner can recommend the right format once they understand the objective; they can't if you've pre-decided the format and skipped the why.
Who is this commercial for? The more specific, the better. A spot aimed at enterprise procurement officers looks and sounds nothing like one aimed at Gen Z consumers. Share who you're trying to reach, what they care about, and what you want them to feel or do after watching. This single input shapes casting, tone, pacing, and music more than almost anything else.
Provide your brand guidelines — the visual identity, tone of voice, colors, and any non-negotiables. Then boil the message down: if a viewer remembers one thing, what is it? Commercials that try to say five things say nothing. The tightest briefs name the single core message and trust the production to deliver it well. This discipline is also what keeps a commercial on-brand, which matters even more for larger organizations — more on that in our post on brand consistency across markets.
A commercial for national broadcast, a pre-roll ad, a social feed, and a trade-show loop are different animals — different lengths, aspect ratios, and levels of polish. Tell the production company every channel the piece needs to serve up front, so they can shoot and edit for all of them from the start rather than retrofitting later. This also drives cost, since usage and licensing scale with where the work runs.
Marketers sometimes hide the budget hoping for a lower number. It backfires. A production company that knows the budget can design the best possible commercial within it — making smart tradeoffs on crew, talent, and locations. Without it, you get a proposal that's either over your range or padded to be safe. Same with timeline: share the real deadline, including when it needs to be live and any internal review dates. For how budgets break down, see our guide on what a commercial costs to produce.
Show, don't just tell. A few examples of commercials whose tone, look, or energy you admire (even from other industries) communicates more than paragraphs of description. Just as useful: examples of what you don't want. References align everyone's mental picture before money is spent.
A strong brief doesn't constrain creativity — it focuses it. It gives the production team the clarity to propose the right idea, quote it accurately, and execute without the churn of endless revisions. The 30 minutes you spend sharpening a brief saves days and dollars later, and it's the difference between a commercial that checks a box and one that actually moves your brand.
If you're planning a brand commercial and want a partner who'll help you sharpen the brief and then deliver on it, get in touch. We've been turning brand goals into commercials that work for over four decades.
From Mr. Camera. Las Vegas video production since 1981.
Need Video Production in Las Vegas?
45 years of experience, owned gear, and enterprise-level clients. Tell us what you're working on.
Get in Touch →