Write the Brief Before You Prompt

Every dentist in America is suddenly passionate about your smile. The med spa across the street wants to start you on a wellness journey. The remodeler is committed to excellence. All three sit on the same glowing purple gradient. They typed about the same request into ChatGPT on the same kind of tired weeknight and posted the first thing it gave them. If you run a small business, or you're the freelancer building its site, AI is the best creative tool you've ever had, and it's also the quickest way to look like everybody you compete with. Read on for how I use it, scaled down to a Tuesday night.

Everyone Typed the Same Prompt

Chances are you've seen the pattern without naming it. Someone asks for a homepage in one line and ships the first answer. I call that Fast, Cheap, Safe. It reads fine and costs nothing. That's the problem. Every other business in your category posted the same fine page this week.

Think back to Heinz in 2022. The brand asked DALL-E 2 to draw ketchup in all kinds of styles, and the pictures kept coming back looking like a Heinz bottle. Great news if you're Heinz. The tool leans toward average. It reaches for the most common answer, and for ketchup the most common answer is theirs. For a family dental practice, it's every other dental homepage in the state. That's where the slop comes from, when nobody tells the tool what to aim for.

Decide What They Should Feel

So, the work moves upstream. Before you open Claude or ChatGPT, write a brief: who's reading, what they want badly, what's in their way, and how they should feel by the bottom of the page. The want and the obstacle create tension, and tension keeps a nervous patient reading past the first screen. The release, the moment they believe you'll fix it, is what gets them to book.

Lacoste's Crocodile Inside opens on a young couple in the middle of a fight, and then their apartment building starts to split apart. The audience knows what to hope for and what to dread right away. Somebody chose that feeling before anyone shot a frame, and that's why we can't look away.

When I was stuck on the Toyota Tacoma launch, I went back to the skate videos we crowded around at the local shop. Spike Jonze's were the ones that made the whole room freak out. Chasing that feeling led to one unbroken take, explosions that were way too big, and stunts done for real in camera. For a dentist, the feeling might be an adult who hasn't been in for six years finally believing nobody's going to lecture them.

Generate Fifty, Keep One

Now that you've got the bar, hand the machine the volume. That's what it's great at. My mantra as a copywriter has always been that the bad ideas have to come out before the good ones show up. AI just gets them out faster. William Burroughs cut pages of text apart and shuffled them to see what surfaced. Asking a chatbot for strange versions is the same move with less tape. Paste your brief into Claude and ask for twenty openings. Then ask again for a note from the owner, a story about one customer who almost didn't call, or what a neighbor would say about you over the fence.

Then judge every one against the bar and throw most of them out. A line that could sit on any practice's site in the country goes, and so does any line that says passionate. I call this way of working Fast, Artful, Impact. You still go fast, you just spend the speed on more tries. When one makes you feel something, even a little, keep it. Rewrite it in your own words and add the detail only you'd know, like the hygienist patients ask for by name.

A Plumber's About Page on a Tuesday

Take a family plumbing company. The default version asks ChatGPT for an About Us page and gets three paragraphs about integrity and serving the community since 1998. Nobody finishes that page. The brief version starts with the customer. They want the water off at a fair price. What's in the way is the last plumber, who quoted a new water heater for a cheap valve. What should they feel by the end of the page? Relieved somebody leveled with them. They should leave sure this crew tells the truth even when the truth costs less. Ask for twenty openings on that and most will be mush. But one might start with the owner's dad talking a customer out of the expensive part. Keep that one, as long as it really happened.

If you're the freelancer on the job, the owner has a story like that and doesn't know it's the good part. Your job is to get it out of them in a fifteen-minute conversation, before anyone types a prompt.

Shoot the Real Work

Logos, header images, the graphics on your posts, and the little banner in your emails run the same play. Midjourney and Canva will hand you a hundred glowing gradients and smiling stock families in an afternoon. Generate a pile and toss anything that could belong to a bank or a gym. That said, I'd never let AI make the proof. A remodeler's project photos and a med spa's before-and-afters have to be real, even if that means a phone and a window with good light. AI can still lay out the page around the real ones and suggest the crop.

Fast, Artful, Impact

Those passionate dentists used a great tool the fast, cheap, safe way, and they'll stay in the middle of the pack until someone decides what a patient should feel before typing a prompt. After all, the tools only get better from here. Your taste is what makes them worth using. Write the brief first.

Steven Townsend is the co-founder of Scowty and a creative consultant living in Los Angeles, with experience at agencies including 72andSunny, Saatchi & Saatchi, and TBWA\Chiat\Day. He's written Super Bowl spots and an Emmy-nominated series, and integrates AI tools like Claude, Midjourney, and Runway into creative workflows for brands including The North Face, Toyota, Genesis, and DoorDash.