How to Write an RFP That Actually Gets You Bold Work

Why “disruptive” is a dangerous word in an RFP

“Disruptive” is a feeling. It tells a creative team how you’d like to be admired, not what your business needs to achieve.

The research backs this up in a way that should give any marketing leader pause. According to Better Briefs, 80 percent of marketers think they’re good at writing briefs. Only 10 percent of agencies agree. The same study estimates that a third of marketing budgets is wasted on poor briefs and misdirected work. Sir John Hegarty put it more sharply than I ever could: writing bad briefs is the most expensive way to write advertising.

1/3 of marketing budgets is wasted on poor briefs and misdirected work.

You read “disruptive” and picture a brand that rewrites the rules of your sector. Your CEO reads it and pictures a slightly more confident version of what you already have. Your agency partner reads it and starts sketching something that will, inevitably, unsettle at least one of you.

If it isn’t unpicked early, it tends to surface three feedback rounds deep, when someone finally says out loud what they meant all along and everyone has to pivot.

Shortlist a sensible set of agencies

Keep your list to six agencies at most.

Expect one or two to drop out once they’ve seen the RFP properly, usually because the fit isn’t right on niche or budget.

Sector experience matters in some cases and not in others. If you’re in a regulated space like pharma, with fixed rules around medical packaging, it’s close to essential. Elsewhere, don’t get too hung up on it. Look for agencies that have solved your kind of challenge before, whether that’s in your sector or one close enough to it.

Cross-check they can actually deliver what they’re pitching, rather than taking the claim at face value. Agencies are, understandably, selling themselves throughout the pitch process, and it’s easy to say yes to a capability that turns out to be aspirational once the contract’s signed. Their own website is one of the quickest tells. For example – if they say they design and build technical websites but their own site is a template with no development credit in sight, that’s worth a question.

The same goes for strategy: if the portfolio is all beautifully finished visual identity with nothing showing the thinking that led to it, ask to see it directly, rather than assuming it happened somewhere off camera. And if multi-channel delivery is part of the pitch, look for real evidence of it: campaigns that ran across paid, social, and content, not just the brand guidelines that sat underneath them. Simply ask for examples of the specific capability you need, not a general creds, and see what comes back.

Ask the problem, not the solution

The single most useful shift you can make is to stop briefing the answer. Instead, brief the problem. This is where you get the most value out of an agency.

Ask for a logo and you’ll get a logo. Will it solve anything?

A far better RFP says you need an identity that connects with a specific audience, communicates a specific thing, and earns a specific result. That gives your agency partner room to solve the actual challenge, rather than execute your guess at the solution.

Ogilvy understood this decades ago. “Give me the freedom of a tight brief,” he said. Notice the word freedom sitting next to the word tight. They aren’t opposites. A tight brief defines the box with absolute clarity, which is exactly what lets a creative team do something interesting inside it.

This is why the best RFPs read as a question, not an instruction, and not a step-by-step process an AI tool helped you assemble. Not “design us a disruptive brand,” but “our audience has changed and our brand hasn’t kept up, and we’re losing the people we most need to reach. Fix that.” That is the kind of ask that produces a result.

What a proper RFP actually contains

Keep the whole document to one or two pages of real substance. Here’s what belongs in it.

The challenge, in plain terms.

Why does this need to happen, and why now? Write down what’s actually driving the decision. Is the current brand failing to connect? Are you losing ground to bigger players? Has the business simply evolved past the identity?

The business objective, and how you’ll measure it.

Be clear about what changes if this works. An RFP should name an objective; if you can’t say what success looks like, you’ve no way of knowing when you’ve achieved it, and neither has your agency. This matters more in B2B than people admit, because brand here is a genuine commercial lever. Strong B2B brands carry a forward price-to-earnings premium of around 65 percent, according to Brand Finance’s 2026 analysis.

The audience, as a person you could picture.

This is where many RFPs struggle and collapse into a demographic spreadsheet e.g “senior decision-makers, 35 to 55.” If budget allows, it’s a great idea to ask the agency to support with research and persona work. If it doesn’t, be prepared to do that piece yourselves and hand it over to the appointed agency.

A real audience definition tells your agency team what keeps that person awake, what they’ve already tried, what they actually believe about your category. Lloyd’s Maritime Academy is a good example from our own portfolio. After fifty years of heritage, the brief could easily have been “modernise us.” Instead, research revealed the audience had shifted underneath them: a new, more diverse generation wanted flexible learning and the ability to progress at their own pace. That insight, included properly in the ask, is what allowed the right creative response, one that delivered results rather than a simple facelift.

The competitive landscape.

Who else is in the room, and what do they sound like? List them. Note what you admire and what you don’t. If you have a view on who’s winning and why, share it. The point of an RFP is distinctiveness, and you can’t be distinctive if you don’t know what you’re standing next to.

The practical reality.

Budget, timeline, deliverables, constraints. Don’t make your agency guess at the scale of ambition. An idea that soars on one budget can fall flat on a fraction of it. Be honest about what you have and what you actually need, and resist the urge to ask for assets you’ll never use.

Time to talk.

Set aside a call where agencies can ask clarifying questions and press into the RFP properly. Chemistry is a real part of pitching, and you only find it in conversation, not in the pages of the response.

Set a clear timeline for the selection process

Lay out your key milestones so every agency knows how the process will run. Include dates for:

• Time for Q&A
• RFP submission deadline
• Agency pitch presentations
• Project kickoff, milestones, and go-live dates

Alongside the dates, explain how you’ll evaluate the proposals. Agencies invest real time in a pitch; telling them what you’re weighing it against is helpful and also sharpens what they send you.

Why AI shouldn’t write your RFP

It’s tempting to get an AI tool to structure the whole document for you, and for a first pass at organising your thoughts, that’s no bad thing.

But an RFP built by AI alone with limited tweaks tends to surface only the visible part of the problem: the obvious deliverables, the standard sections, the language that sounds right.

Michael Gentle calls this the iceberg problem: AI can help identify the visible tip, but the larger mass sits below the surface in the internal context that only your business holds, in his case writing about rebrand planning.

The same limitation shows up in cost and timeline. AI has no visibility into your organisation’s actual approval chain, its appetite for risk, or how long internal sign-off genuinely takes once politics gets involved, so any budget or schedule it proposes is a plausible-sounding guess rather than a workable plan.

An RFP is a promise.

Here’s what I’ve learned after more rebrands than I can count. The work delivered by the appointed agency should address the challenge posed by the RFP.

So before you write “bold” or “category-defining” or “not afraid to break the rules,” stop. Ask what problem you’re actually solving. Ask who you’re solving it for. Ask what has to change in the business, not just the logo. Write that down instead. It’s less exciting than a “disruptive” creative steer. It’s also the difference between a brand that moves your numbers and one that just updates your slide deck.

In conclusion – an RFP isn’t a wish list; it’s about the problem you’re going to solve.