Shoot before you plan

The usual order is: agree the plan, book the space, then brief the creative to fit what has been bought. It is the order that makes sense if you think of media as a container and creative as the thing poured into it. It is also how campaigns end up with a key visual that works at A4 and disappears at fourteen metres.

A billboard is read in about two seconds by somebody who is doing something else. That is not a constraint you design around afterwards. It decides how many words there can be, how much of the frame the product has to occupy, and whether the photograph you have can survive being cropped to a shape three times wider than it is tall.

We reversed the order on a fashion client last year: shot the collection first, looked at what the photographs could actually hold, and only then built the plan. What came out was fewer placements, larger, at eye level, in the two neighbourhoods where the brand already sold best. The plan was smaller than the one we would have written in the other order, and it was smaller because the pictures told us what was worth buying.

The cost of getting this backwards is not usually a disaster. It is a quiet tax: a campaign that works at seventy per cent of what it could have, and a client who concludes the medium is weak when what was weak was the fit.

So the brief we ask for is not "what do you want to book". It is "what do you have, and what can it carry". Everything after that is arithmetic.