Case Study: Britbox and D&AD Masterclasses
The creative team at streaming company BritBox wanted to overhaul the briefing process and bring a strategic focus to their work. Briefs come to the creative team from various departments, each with unique perspectives and requirements. The team were keen to establish a system that meant that strategy and specific detail were part of every task or project from the beginning.
The team approached D&AD about creating a bespoke masterclass that would give them the tools and language to transform how briefing is done at BritBox.
“I had always known about D&AD and had taken a class with them before separately, and I really loved the interactive way that they showed the presentation, interacted with the attendees, as well as really gave fantastic real life knowledge and other use cases,” says BritBox designer Beth Newman.
D&AD shared a proposal by strategy and briefing specialist Uri Baruchin, which the creative team fed back on to find the right balance of exercises. Taking into account time and geographic constraints, they landed on a two-day masterclass held in BritBox’s New York office as well as video sessions for teams in London, the Nordics and Australia.
During the masterclass, Uri gave participants an introduction to strategy, before analysing case studies for famous campaign briefs to better understand the building blocks of a strong brief and how strategy comes into play. They also explored real briefs that the BritBox creative team were working with in practice to identify where improvements could be made.
As a result of the masterclass, the team have a better understanding of how and why their briefing process could be updated. It has also given them a greater sense of authority to push back on briefs that required more detail or strategic thought, especially as they are now equipped with the right language to justify those requests and clarify what they need from colleagues in briefing departments.
Involving a respected organisation like D&AD in their journey to redefine the creative team’s strategic approach ultimately added weight to the kinds of changes they wanted to make. It even fed into the decision to hire new strategy roles at BritBox, bolstering the emphasis on strategy within the company.
“It was a really great kickoff moment to have everyone understand what strategy is and how it applies to us and our briefs,” says Beth. “Definitely great things came out of it and our creative team, I would say, is in a much better position to defend our decisions and push for more strategy, which is great.”
D&AD Masterclasses power up careers and future-proof businesses by focusing on the creative skills of tomorrow, taught by the stars of today. Online and offline, our creative learning programmes connect you and your business directly to the people making the most outstanding work today and enable you to learn skills to generate brilliant outcomes tomorrow.