Advertising Agencies Editing and Proofreading Services

An agency's output is made by people who were not in the client meeting, working from a document written by someone who was. Everything the strategist understood and did not write down gets reinvented by a creative team, and the work comes back either off-strategy or safe. The brief is the only mechanism the agency has for transmitting a thought from one room to another, and most briefs are a summary of the client's request with a target audience attached.

We edit what advertising agencies produce — creative briefs and strategy documents, client briefs and reverse briefs, campaign proposals and pitch documents, new business credentials and case studies, strategic and planning documents, tone of voice and brand guidelines, campaign concepts and rationale documents, scripts and copy across media, presentation decks and speaker notes, post-campaign analysis and effectiveness reporting, awards entries, scope of work and estimate documentation, and internal process and onboarding material. Our editors work on the documents that carry a thought between people.

The creative brief is where an agency's thinking either survives the journey or does not, and the failure is nearly always that it describes the assignment rather than making an argument. A brief listing the product, the audience as a demographic, the objectives as three business metrics and the proposition as a benefit gives a creative team nothing to react against. We write briefs so the audience is a person doing something specific rather than a segment — someone standing in the aisle who has already decided to buy one of these and is choosing between two; so the single thought is stated in a sentence that could be wrong, because a proposition nobody could disagree with is not a proposition; so the tension is named, since the interesting work lives in the gap between what the brand wants to say and what the audience currently believes; and so what is fixed is separated from what is genuinely open, which is the information creatives most need and most often have to discover through rejected work. We also insist the brief states what the client will not approve, because that is known in the room and is otherwise learned in round three.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unreleased campaigns, pitch material and client information. We are editors rather than strategists or creatives, and we offer no view on strategy, creative work, media choices or advertising regulation. What we can do is make the thinking legible to the people who have to act on it.