A creative brief that survives handoff
Most briefs lose their constraints at the first handoff. A template that carries locks, references and rejected directions, and stays next to the review loop.
Every guide, comparison and workflow we’ve published on Client Contracts.
22 articles
Most briefs lose their constraints at the first handoff. A template that carries locks, references and rejected directions, and stays next to the review loop.
A client who re-encodes your master and strips its credentials owns the compliance gap that follows. The clause and delivery spec that assign that risk.
Define revision versus new deliverable, cap the rounds, set a feedback window, price the overruns. Includes proposal text and a round-four conversation script.
What an agreement should say about AI involvement, ownership limits, who carries the disclosure duty and how indemnity is allocated. With drafting language.
Round counting priced a production cost that no longer exists. Price changes of direction, and make refinement unlimited inside a locked direction.
A generated asset can create exposure many times the invoice behind it. Why the fee-linked cap is standard, which carve-outs are fair, and what to concede.
Volume-based change-order triggers stopped working once another version cost almost nothing. Four direction-change triggers that still hold, with clause text.
Unprofitable jobs are visible on the discovery call. Fourteen questions that surface specific action, exact geometry and likeness risk before you price.
Clients happy to run generated work often refuse to be named for it. Negotiate case-study permission at signature, not after delivery.
Enterprise clients now require brand assets never enter a training set, and the duty flows through you to every tool. The clause, plus the audit behind it.
Most agreements in force predate generative production and are quietly hostile to it. The six sections to amend, and how to raise it without alarm.
Deliverable counts stopped predicting effort once variants got cheap. Scope by approval decisions instead, and price each one by what it locks.
Disclosure, IP warranty carve-out, training-data exclusion, liability cap. What each clause stops, the order to negotiate them, and where the addendum belongs.
You cannot assign copyright that never existed, so a blanket originality warranty may already be broken. Carve-out language that stays honest and still sells.
A per-job records structure for generated work: what to capture at delivery, which three records everyone skips, and a retention clock that starts on use.
Vague audit rights over AI use turn into open-ended discovery. A scoped clause, plus the record set that makes the whole audit take an hour.
A four-step incident sequence for pulled creative, plus the contract clauses that should already decide who pays before the phone call happens.
Contract language covering AI production, where audience disclosure is actually required, and the framing that sells iteration speed over cheap labour.
Blanket no-AI clauses are usually aimed at a risk you are not creating. A decision tree for complying, negotiating a scoped exception, or declining.
Indemnity splits two ways: you cover tool terms-of-service breaches, the client covers distribution and labelling. A two-way split to drop into an agreement.
Prompts, reference sets and workflow graphs built on a client job are unassigned in most contracts. Clause language that keeps method and gives outputs.
Turn 'approved' from a feeling into a test: technical spec, binary brand checks, a bounded subjective layer, a named approver, and a deemed-accepted window.