Products and Advertising: Why the Brief Comes Second

Products and advertising work best when they are designed together, not handed off in sequence. The most common failure pattern I see is a product that gets built in isolation, then passed to marketing with the instruction to “make it land.” That is not a brief. That is a rescue mission.

Advertising cannot fix a product that has no clear reason to exist, and a genuinely differentiated product will always be easier to advertise than one that was built without the customer in mind. The relationship between the two is not linear. It is iterative, and the earlier marketing thinking enters the product conversation, the better the outcome tends to be.

Why Most Advertising Starts Too Late

There is a structural problem in how most organisations sequence product and marketing work. Product teams build the thing. Then they hand it to marketing. Then marketing writes a brief. Then creative gets involved. By the time anyone is asking “what does this mean to the customer,” the product decisions are already locked.

I have been in that room more times than I can count. A client arrives with a product that has been in development for 18 months, a launch date that cannot move, and a question that should have been asked at the start: “How do we position this?” The honest answer, which I have learned to give more directly over the years, is that positioning is not a marketing problem at that point. It is a product problem that marketing has been asked to solve with words.

This is not a criticism of any individual team. It is a structural issue. Product and marketing are often organised as separate functions with separate timelines, separate KPIs, and separate leadership. The handoff between them is treated as a process step rather than a strategic moment. And when the handoff happens too late, advertising ends up working harder than it should, trying to create meaning around a product that never had a clear strategic foundation.

If you are thinking about how products and advertising connect within a broader commercial framework, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the strategic decisions that sit upstream of channel and creative execution. The relationship between product and advertising is one of the most consequential of those decisions.

What Advertising Can and Cannot Do for a Product

Advertising is an amplifier. It makes what is already true about a product more visible, more memorable, and more emotionally resonant. What it cannot do is manufacture a truth that is not there.

I judged the Effie Awards, which are specifically designed to recognise advertising effectiveness rather than creative craft alone. What struck me, sitting with those papers, was how consistently the strongest entries had one thing in common: the product itself had a genuine point of difference, and the advertising found a way to make that difference matter to a specific audience. The creative execution varied enormously. The strategic foundation did not.

The entries that struggled, often despite strong creative work, tended to be advertising a product that was functionally indistinguishable from its competitors. The briefs were well-written. The production values were high. But there was no real answer to the question “why this, not that?” and no amount of craft could paper over that gap.

This is worth being direct about, because a lot of marketing budgets are being spent on exactly this problem. Brands that have not done the hard work of product differentiation are spending heavily on advertising that asks customers to make a choice without giving them a reason to. The advertising is not failing. The product strategy is.

Understanding how advertising interacts with market penetration is worth examining carefully. Market penetration strategy is often discussed as a growth lever, but the mechanism matters. Advertising can accelerate penetration when the product is ready for a wider audience. It cannot create penetration when the product has not yet earned the right to grow.

The Brief Should Come After the Strategic Work, Not Before It

The creative brief is often treated as the starting point of advertising. In my experience, it should be closer to the end of the strategic process, not the beginning.

Before you write a brief, you need to know: who is the customer, what do they want, what does the product actually deliver, and why would a rational person choose it over the alternatives? These are not brief-writing questions. They are product strategy questions. If you cannot answer them clearly before you brief an agency, you are asking the agency to do your strategic thinking for you. Some agencies will do it, and some will do it well, but it is not a reliable system.

Early in my career I worked on a campaign for a financial services client where the brief arrived with a very confident tone of voice guide and almost no clarity on the competitive context. We wrote good work. It tested well internally. It did not move the commercial needle in any meaningful way, because the positioning was not grounded in anything the customer actually cared about. The brief had skipped the hard part and gone straight to personality.

The hard part is this: understanding what your product genuinely does better than the alternatives, and finding the customers for whom that specific advantage matters most. That is not a creative question. It is a commercial one. And it has to be answered before the brief is written, not during the creative process.

BCG’s work on commercial transformation and go-to-market strategy makes a similar point from the consulting side: growth strategies that work tend to be grounded in a clear understanding of where a business has a genuine right to win, not just where it would like to compete. The advertising question is downstream of that.

How Performance Advertising Changed the Relationship Between Products and Ads

The rise of performance advertising over the last 15 years has had a significant effect on how organisations think about the relationship between products and advertising. And not entirely a positive one.

When advertising became measurable at the click level, the temptation was to optimise relentlessly toward what converted. That is rational, in isolation. The problem is that conversion optimisation tends to focus on people who were already close to buying. It captures existing intent rather than creating new demand. And it tells you almost nothing about whether your product has a long-term competitive position, or whether you are just harvesting a market that someone else built.

I spent a period earlier in my career overweighting lower-funnel performance channels. The numbers looked good. ROAS was strong. But when I started asking harder questions, it became clear that a significant portion of what we were attributing to paid search would have happened anyway. We were paying to capture intent that our brand had already created, or that the category had already created, and calling it performance. It was efficient in the short term and misleading in the long term.

The analogy I keep coming back to is a clothes shop. Someone who tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone who walks past the window. But the window display is what gets them through the door. Performance advertising is often optimised entirely for the moment of trying on, with no investment in the window. That works until the footfall dries up.

Products need advertising that builds preference over time, not just advertising that converts people who have already decided. The two types of work are different, they require different briefs, different channels, and different success metrics, and treating them as interchangeable is one of the more expensive mistakes in modern marketing. Why go-to-market feels harder now is a useful read on the structural pressures that push teams toward short-term performance at the expense of long-term brand building.

Product-Led Growth Is Still Advertising, Just by Another Name

There is a version of the products-versus-advertising debate that frames them as alternatives. Either you build a great product and it grows itself, or you advertise a mediocre one. This is a false choice, and it tends to be made by people who have not run a commercial business at scale.

Product-led growth is real and it works, but it works because the product experience itself functions as a form of marketing. Every touchpoint, every onboarding flow, every referral mechanic, every moment of delight or frustration, is shaping how customers think and talk about the product. That is advertising. It is just distributed across the product experience rather than concentrated in paid media.

The discipline required to make product-led growth work is not fundamentally different from the discipline required to make advertising work. You need to understand the customer. You need a clear reason why they should choose you. You need to deliver on the promise at every interaction. The medium is different. The strategic requirements are the same.

What product-led growth does not do is remove the need for demand creation. Even the most viral products need people to encounter them in the first place. Referral loops and word of mouth are powerful, but they are downstream of initial awareness. Someone has to see the thing before they can recommend it. That is still an advertising problem, even if the answer is not a paid media campaign.

BCG’s analysis of brand strategy and go-to-market alignment is worth reading in this context. The argument that brand and commercial strategy need to be built together, not sequenced, applies equally to the product and advertising relationship. Neither can do its best work without the other.

When Advertising Reveals a Product Problem

One of the most useful things advertising can do is surface a product problem that the organisation has been avoiding. This sounds counterintuitive, but it happens regularly.

When you try to write a brief for a product and you cannot articulate why a customer should choose it, that is information. When you run a campaign and the click-through rate is strong but conversion is weak, that is information. When you test messaging and nothing lands, that is information. Good advertising processes create feedback loops that reveal what is true about the product, not just what the organisation wishes were true.

I have seen this play out in both directions. A campaign that underperforms and triggers an honest conversation about product-market fit. And a campaign that overperforms on a narrow audience and reveals a segment the product team had not prioritised. In both cases, the advertising was doing something useful beyond its direct commercial role. It was generating signal about where the product stood in the market.

This only works if the organisation is willing to read the signal honestly. If every campaign that underperforms is blamed on the creative, or the media buy, or the timing, the feedback loop breaks. The product never gets the information it needs. And marketing keeps spending against a positioning problem that no campaign can solve.

Tools that capture genuine customer behaviour, rather than just post-campaign surveys, are valuable here. Understanding how customers move through a product experience can surface friction points that neither the product team nor the marketing team would have identified independently. The data is not the answer, but it is often a better question.

The Creative Brief as a Strategic Document

I want to spend a moment on the brief itself, because it is where the product-advertising relationship either holds together or falls apart in practice.

A good brief is not a summary of what the marketing team wants the advertising to say. It is a strategic document that gives the creative team enough clarity about the customer, the competitive context, and the product’s genuine advantage to make something that actually works. The best briefs I have seen are short. They answer a small number of hard questions with real precision. The worst briefs are long, full of brand language, and answer none of the hard questions at all.

The hardest question in any brief is the one about competitive differentiation. Not “what does the product do?” but “why would a customer choose this over the thing they are using now?” If the answer is “because it is better,” that is not a brief. That is a wish. If the answer is “because it is the only product in this category that does X for customers who need Y,” that is a brief. That is something a creative team can work with.

I remember sitting in a briefing session at Cybercom early in my career, for a Guinness project. The founder had to leave mid-session and handed me the whiteboard pen on the way out. The room was full of people who had been working on the brand for years. My internal reaction was not confidence. But the discipline of having to stand at that whiteboard and articulate what the brief was actually asking for, in front of people who knew more about the brand than I did, taught me something I have not forgotten. The brief has to be defensible out loud. If you cannot say it clearly in a room, it is not clear enough to brief a creative team.

Channel Strategy Should Follow Product and Audience, Not Habit

One of the places where the product-advertising relationship breaks down most visibly is in channel selection. Organisations tend to default to the channels they know, or the channels that are easiest to measure, rather than the channels that are right for the product and the audience.

This is a real problem. A product that requires demonstration needs channels that allow for demonstration. A product with a long consideration cycle needs advertising that builds trust over time, not just retargeting pixels. A product targeting an audience that does not spend time on paid social needs advertising that meets them where they are, not where the media plan is most comfortable.

The channel question should be answered after the audience question, not before it. Who is the customer? Where do they spend their time? What kind of information do they need to make a decision? What does trust look like in this category? These questions determine the channel strategy. The channel strategy does not determine the answers.

Creator-led content is an interesting case here. Go-to-market strategies that use creators work well for certain product types and certain audiences, particularly where trust is built through demonstration and peer recommendation rather than brand authority. But the decision to use creators should come from the audience insight, not from the fact that creator content is currently popular. The same principle applies to every channel.

Growth tools and tactics are worth evaluating with the same discipline. Growth hacking tools can accelerate distribution, but they work best when the product already has a clear audience and a clear reason to exist. Applied to a product that has not yet found its footing, they tend to produce noise rather than signal.

What Good Looks Like: Products and Advertising Working Together

When products and advertising are genuinely aligned, the work looks different. The messaging is specific rather than generic. The creative has something real to work with. The audience can tell, quickly, whether the product is for them or not. And the commercial results tend to compound over time rather than plateau.

Getting there requires a few things that are harder than they sound. Marketing needs to be involved in product conversations earlier than most organisations currently allow. Product teams need to be honest about where the genuine competitive advantage lies, rather than listing features and calling it positioning. And the brief needs to be written after the strategic work is done, not as a substitute for it.

None of this is complicated in theory. In practice, it requires organisations to work differently than they are structured to work. Product and marketing functions with separate timelines, separate leadership, and separate definitions of success will tend to produce the handoff problem by default. Fixing it is an organisational design question as much as a marketing one.

Over the years I have grown teams from 20 to over 100 people, and the hardest part of that growth was not hiring or training. It was maintaining the strategic coherence between functions that naturally drift apart as the organisation gets larger. Product and marketing drift apart faster than almost any other pairing, because their success metrics pull in different directions. Closing that gap deliberately, structurally, not just through good intentions, is one of the more consequential things a commercial leader can do.

There is more on the strategic decisions that connect product, audience, and growth in the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub. The articles there cover the full range of decisions that sit between having a product and building a business around it.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

Frequently Asked Questions