What should the brief open with?
The brief should open with the outcome the campaign exists to produce and the measure that will decide whether it did. Sign-ups from a defined segment at or below a target cost, measured in the CRM, is an outcome. Three emails and two ad sets is a deliverable list.
Outcome briefs let the Marketing Strategist FTE judge that a different mix of channels beats the obvious one, which is the judgement you are delegating. Deliverable lists get you the deliverables.
How specific should the audience be?
Describe the audience in the terms your own data uses, so the FTE can find it in the connected systems rather than interpreting an adjective. A segment in the CRM, a customer list, a set of firmographic filters, or an existing audience in an ad account is concrete; growth-minded operators is not.
Include who the campaign is not for as well. Exclusions prevent wasted spend and, occasionally, the awkward outreach to an existing customer or a competitor.
What must the brief say about channels and caps?
Name the channels allowed and the channels forbidden, because the FTE will otherwise treat every connected channel as available. Then set the caps: total campaign budget, per-channel ceilings, and the daily limit, all as hard numbers.
The caps are the most important lines in the brief. They define the worst realistic outcome, and on ftes.ai they are enforced as limits the FTE cannot exceed rather than as targets it aims for.
- Outcome and measure: what success is and where it is counted
- Audience: in your data's own terms, with exclusions
- Channels: allowed and forbidden, named
- Caps: total, per channel, per day, as hard numbers
- Rules: brand voice, prohibited claims, regulated language
- Deadline: and any dates the campaign must not run on
Why do prohibited claims deserve their own section?
Prohibited claims deserve their own section because they prevent the class of incident that damages trust fastest: a comparative claim that is not defensible, a pricing promise the business cannot honour, or language a regulator would object to.
Write them as prohibitions rather than as guidance. Never compare us to a named competitor is enforced; be careful with comparisons is interpreted. The Performance Ads FTE's policy pre-check catches platform rule violations, but your own rules only apply if they are written.
What should the brief leave to the FTE?
Leave sequencing, channel mix within the allowed set, creative iteration, and budget allocation within the caps to the Marketing Strategist FTE. Those are the judgements you are paying for, and specifying them by hand turns a Digital FTE into a script.
Every proposal it makes inside that space arrives in Approvals with reasoning and a preview, so delegating the method does not mean losing sight of it. You approve the campaign plan and then each asset, which is where control actually lives.
What does the FTE do with the brief once it is approved?
Once the brief is approved it becomes a mission in the Marketing Strategist FTE's workspace: a bounded push with a goal, a target subset, a deadline, a budget, and visible progress. The FTE proposes the campaign plan against the brief, with each element labelled as sourced or assumed, and the plan waits in Approvals. On approval it proposes the creative and the channel setup, each gated, each checked against the prohibited-claims section by the fact gate before you see it.
During the campaign the morning brief reports progress against the mission's goal and spend against its cap, and detections flag anything the brief said to watch for, such as a channel underperforming or a claim being flagged by a platform, with a proposed response. At the end the FTE writes the campaign's review in the first person against the brief's own success criteria, stating what worked, what did not, and what was unmeasured. A brief written to the structure above is what makes that review a reading of the record rather than an argument about what the campaign was for.