Most briefs tell me more about a brand's insecurities than about the campaign itself, and I can usually tell within the first page. Four pages of brand history, a full paragraph on the founder's story, a section reminding the creator of the mission statement, and then, buried near the bottom, one vague sentence on what the content is actually supposed to accomplish. That ordering is backwards, and it's the single most common reason an influencer campaign underperforms. It has almost nothing to do with the creator you hired.
A brief is either so vague the creator has to guess what you actually want, or so prescriptive they can't do the one thing you hired them for in the first place, which is being themselves in front of an audience that already trusts them. Both failure modes produce the same flat, forgettable content, just for opposite reasons.
A good brief starts with one objective, stated in a single sentence rather than five goals dressed up as one strategy. Are you driving awareness, trial, or a purchase? Each of those requires genuinely different content, shot and paced differently, built around a different call to action, and a brief that hedges across all three at once produces content that does none of them well, because the creator has no way to prioritize what actually matters most in the sixty seconds they have. If you can't state your objective in one sentence, the campaign isn't ready to run yet, full stop, and that's worth fixing before you send anything to a creator.
The audience needs to be described as actual people, not a demographic bracket pulled from a media plan. "Women twenty five to thirty four" tells a creator nothing they can use. "People who tried three different retinols and gave up because none of them worked" tells them everything, since they immediately know what problem to speak to, what tone will land, and what phrasing is going to make someone roll their eyes and scroll past. That level of specificity is the difference between a brief that produces something and a brief that produces a guess.
There should be one core thing the content has to communicate, not five messages stacked into sixty seconds because everyone in the meeting wanted their point included. Everything past that first message is just noise competing with itself for the same three seconds of attention.
What actually belongs in there matters less than what gets left out. Cutting the brand history, the list of product features, and the examples of previous campaigns you liked matters, because showing a creator what you want them to copy is the fastest way to guarantee they copy it instead of doing what they're actually good at. All of that material constrains a creator's thinking instead of freeing it up, and constrained thinking is exactly what produces content indistinguishable from every other brand deal that creator has ever done.
What should actually be in there is the one thing that has to be true by the end of the video, a real description of the audience, and honestly, why you picked this specific creator over anyone else. That last one matters more than brands realize. If you can't articulate why this particular person, with this particular voice, is right for this campaign, you probably picked them off a follower count spreadsheet instead of because their content actually fits what you're trying to say. A creator who's good at their job will ask you the other questions if they genuinely need answers. You don't need to pre-answer everything for them.
I'd go further than most people writing about this topic and say a brief isn't a creative request form, and it shouldn't read like one. Its entire job is to give someone the minimum information required to do good work and then get out of their way completely. The moment a brief starts reading like a legal document or a brand bible, you've built something that protects the brand's discomfort with letting go, not something that helps the creator make anything worth watching.
I've watched brands spend three weeks writing an eight page brief and then wonder why the resulting content feels stiff and over managed. I've also watched a five sentence brief, sent to the right creator, produce something that outperformed every piece of paid media in the campaign that quarter. The correlation isn't subtle once you've seen it enough times. Length and specificity of a brief tend to move in the opposite direction from how good the content turns out, right up until the point where the brief is so short it fails to answer the one question that actually matters. Find that line, stay on the short side of it, and trust the person you hired to fill in the rest.
One more thing worth saying plainly, because nobody in these meetings ever does. If you find yourself needing a fourth page to explain what you want, that's usually a sign the brand hasn't actually decided what it wants yet, and no amount of extra detail in the brief is going to fix a decision that hasn't been made internally. Send that problem back to the marketing team, not to the creator.