How to Brief a Media Buying Team: A Checklist
The quality of a media buying campaign is decided before the first dollar of spend — in the brief. A complete brief gets you a launch plan in days; a vague one burns weeks in clarification ping-pong and produces campaigns built on guesses. This checklist is the exact information structure our team asks for, whether the offer is a crypto exchange or a hyper-casual game.
Why the brief decides the outcome
A media buyer's first hundred decisions — sources, formats, GEOs, creative angles, bid levels — all derive from what you tell them about your economics. Wrong or missing inputs do not produce no decisions; they produce wrong ones, which are worse because they cost money to discover.
The brief is also where incentives get aligned. When the buyer knows exactly which event you pay for and what it is worth, optimization points at your revenue from day one. When the brief says 'get installs, we'll figure out quality later,' you will get installs — and figure out quality later, at invoice time. An hour spent on the brief is the highest-ROI hour in the whole engagement.
The core: offer, economics, GEOs, KPIs
Start with four blocks. The offer: what the product is, what the user must do, and what they get — one honest paragraph, not a pitch deck. The economics: what a converted user is worth to you and over what window — payout per event, expected LTV if you know it, and the maximum cost per event that keeps the campaign profitable. GEOs: the markets you want, ranked, with licensing or coverage constraints stated plainly. KPIs: the billable event and the quality metrics behind it — deposit rate, retention, payer share.
For a crypto offer the billable event might be a first deposit; for a forex broker, an FTD with a minimum amount; for a game, day-7 ROAS. Name it precisely — 'registration' has at least three incompatible definitions, and each prices differently.
Tracking and access
No tracking, no campaign — write that part of the brief before creative. State your MMP (AppsFlyer, Adjust, Branch, Kochava, Singular or another), confirm postback configuration for the billable events, and name the person on your side who owns tracking changes. If postbacks are not firing test events yet, that is the first work item, because every other deadline depends on it.
Also specify validation and rejection rules: which fraud filters are active, how rejected installs are handled commercially, and the attribution windows you use. Ten minutes of alignment here prevents the most common partnership dispute in mobile advertising — the month-end 'these installs don't count' argument.
Compliance and creative boundaries
Every vertical has lines creatives may not cross, and the brief is where you draw them. Regulated verticals — casino and betting, forex, crypto, nutra — come with license numbers, permitted claims, banned phrases and GEO-specific rules. Write them down. 'Stay compliant' is not a brief; 'no income guarantees, no misleading urgency, licensed markets only, disclaimers as attached' is.
Include brand assets and the rejection history too: if platform moderators banned three pre-landers last quarter, your buyer needs to know why before building the fourth. Advertisers remain responsible for the legality of their offers in target markets — a good buying team keeps funnels policy-safe, but it cannot license your product for you.
Timeline, budget and communication
Close the brief with logistics. Budget: test budget and the conditions for scaling it — 'test at X, scale to Y when cost per event holds for a week' is a complete sentence that saves a dozen meetings. Timeline: when you need the campaign live and what hard dates exist (product launches, sporting calendars, GEO license start dates). Communication: one channel, one decision-maker, one weekly review slot.
Our own process runs recon and audit in 24–48 hours, creative production in 2–4 days, then launch — but those clocks only start when the brief is complete. A missing postback or an undefined billable event pauses everything downstream.
The one-page checklist
- Offer description — what it is, what the user does, what they get.
- Billable event, its payout, and your maximum profitable cost per event.
- Ranked GEO list with licensing constraints.
- Quality KPIs behind the billable event: retention, deposit rate, payer share.
- MMP named, postbacks tested, rejection rules and attribution windows stated.
- Compliance lines: permitted claims, banned phrases, licensed markets, brand assets.
- Test budget, scaling conditions, hard dates, decision-maker and weekly slot.
Fill these seven lines and any competent team can come back with a real launch plan. Fill them for us at the Mobadly contact page — or browse the vertical playbooks to see what a plan looks like for your market.