 The creative brief exercise is one of the most challenging instructional designed pieces I've developed yet in my teaching career. The first thing is that you teach students what a creative brief is and then you ask them to produce one as a team. And that's critical because that's the comprehension moment. Do you understand the basics of the technique? Can you apply it? There's a side piece to that end and that is that in the marketing profession but candidly I think in most professions today there is no such thing as a sole practitioner. Everything is team-based. The very fact that the data right now shows crowdsourcing dramatically impacting the way that critical businesses are solved, scientific decisions are made, the idea that you can have organically gained teams working together to solve problems is so essential in today's world that I overemphasize if anything teamwork in my courses. So it's important to link that there's a skill, it's called writing a creative brief and it is done in a team environment because number one you should get better work that way and number two it so strongly emulates the world of work that my students will be going into. The next piece is that I evaluate that creative brief. So it's a very straightforward process. It's a rubric, it's pretty straightforward, all of us have done that before. Then the next phase is I had to write what's called a persona and that's the part of today in class when you're not presenting you're going to sit there as a creative and it includes such I think delicious lines as your father's never understood what you did for a living. You wanted to paint and he kept saying you're going to be a starving artist and you said no, no, no, I'm going to learn how to do that in Adobe Illustrator and do it for an advertising agency and so that's the next step is creating that. And the students really enjoy that part because you're asking them to put on the mantle of someone who actually may be a friend of theirs or a career they just themselves always wanted to do and don't know how to get into so it's a great moment. The students then take my feedback on the creative brief and they go away for a weekend and they create a presentation but don't think PowerPoint slide one, PowerPoint slide two, PowerPoint slide three. Think your job team number one is to compel, engage, entice, inform the rest of the students who are sitting there as if they are that person who's a creative and so they take this very seriously because it's their peers. It isn't presenting to Ann, it's presenting to everybody else and then I have already in the background set up yet another part to this exercise. There's a form that you fill out so you come to my class that day and you have your laptop open and you are waiting for the first team to present and you're sitting there pretending to be a creative and you're listening and then you answer some very simple questions about how did that team do? Number one, did they communicate what you needed to know to go off and do the assignment? Number two, did they do it in a way that they understood you? Now the students have a bit of struggle with that, they're trying to be in a role that doesn't quite fit and they're being talked to by students who don't really know exactly what it is they're doing but having said all of that to watch these presentations is moments of brilliance. The students so far exceed my expectations of their ability to anticipate what it's like to be a creative, it creates these wonderful moments in class and the students because everyone who's in college today or university today thinks in several tiers at one time so they're listening and they're probably also thinking to themselves what I'm going to do tonight and then at the same time they're typing an answer of gosh did you know you tug on your hair or I don't really know what you just said to me, I got really excited but I wish I knew why and all of these wonderful moments of feedback. The learning moments of clarity of communication, compellingness of the nature, strength of getting the branding message through the creative brief. The students are so much better than I am and it is received as a peer, it's received on a very giving basis, it's so different and so compelling so that happens. At the end of class there's a very simple ranking, you get to choose the standout team, the almost oh my god it was so close to standout team and I really want to mention these guys because they rocked, they maybe weren't one of the one twos but they were really solid and what that does is it's done in a respectful fashion, you don't choose the worst teams, you only choose the teams that really spoke to you and then all of that is really the essence of the exercise. I added a piece, what I asked them to do is you have 48 hours, I need no more than one page but no less than one paragraph of your reflection, what happened in this assignment, what did you learn? And I've had people email me at 36 hours, frantic, I have seven pages, I can't make it fit on one page even if it's six point type, please help me. I've had other students quietly submit the most thoughtful and insightful pieces I've read probably as an instructor. I've had people for whom every single one of their four sentences is a gem, I never get bad feedback because the essence of this exercise forces so much thought that the reflection exercise itself is almost effortless. It's unlike a reflection assignment, tell me what you learned this semester which I usually find is so challenging for me to read and for students to produce that it has less usefulness but this is right away in an exercise that already has been designed to make you be thoughtful, that's a much different exercise and very powerful for the students to do that self-reflective learning.