A creative test brief template

The brief, in order

• Hypothesis: one sentence, such as 'a question in the first line will keep more people watching'.
• The one thing that changes: hook, offer, format or audience. Everything else stays the same.
• Creative IDs: the control and each variant, named by the agency's naming convention.
• Metric: the single number that decides the test, and where it is read from.

Limits

• Budget per variant and the number of days, agreed with the client before launch.
• Stop rule: the point at which a variant is paused, written as a number and not as a feeling.
• What counts as a win, a loss and 'not enough data'.

Approval and record

• Name the approver, and keep the version they saw next to the brief.
• Log the result against the creative IDs, so the learning outlives the ads.