A few months ago, a founder came to us with what should have been a great story. They'd just closed a funding round, had a product that was genuinely interesting, and their timing was perfect, right on the edge of a news cycle that was working in their favour. We were excited about it.
Then they sent through their brief.
It was a two-line email: "We just raised $2M. Can you get us in the Herald?" No context on what the product does, no detail on what made the round notable, no founder backstory, no customer proof points, nothing a journalist could actually write about. We spent the next two weeks pulling that information out of them piece by piece, and by the time the pitch was ready, the news cycle had moved on.
That story still landed, but it landed smaller than it should have. And the reason wasn't the pitch, or the journalist, or the market. It was the brief.
Why does the brief matter so much?
A PR agency can only work with what you give them. That sounds obvious, but it's the single most common reason campaigns underperform, and it's almost never talked about. According to Cision's 2026 State of the Media report, 66% of journalists now rely on PR-provided content for story ideas, which means the raw material you hand your agency flows directly into what lands on a journalist's desk. If your brief is thin, the pitch will be thin. If your brief is rich with detail, anecdote and context, the pitch writes itself.
At Payper, we've worked with more than 200 New Zealand businesses since 2016, and the pattern is remarkably consistent. The clients who get the best coverage aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest news. They're the ones who brief well.
What does a good PR brief actually include?
You don't need a twenty-page document. You don't need a comms strategy or a brand pyramid or a stakeholder mapping exercise. What you need is enough raw material for your agency to find the story and tell it compellingly. In practical terms, that means five things.
The news, stated plainly. What actually happened, or what's about to happen? Not your marketing positioning, not a paragraph of superlatives, just the facts. "We've launched a new product that does X" is more useful than "We're disrupting the Y space with a paradigm-shifting solution." Journalists need a concrete thing to write about, and your agency needs to know what that thing is before they can dress it up.
Why it matters, and to whom. Every founder thinks their news is important, and often it is, but your agency needs to understand who it's important to. Is this a story for the business pages, or the technology section, or the lifestyle pages? Is it relevant to a national audience or a regional one? A good brief answers the "so what?" question honestly. If you're not sure why a journalist would care, say that, because your agency can help you find the angle, but only if they know you haven't found it yet.
Context and background. What's the bigger picture this news sits inside? If you've raised a funding round, what are you going to do with the money and why does the market need it? If you're launching a product, what problem does it solve and who was struggling with that problem before? Journalists don't write announcements, they write stories, and stories need context. The more you can give your agency, the richer the pitch they'll write.
People and proof points. Journalists want to talk to real people and see real evidence. Your brief should include who's available for interview (and who isn't), whether you have customers willing to speak on the record, and any data or metrics that back up your claims. Muck Rack's 2026 State of Journalism report found that 78% of journalists say a pitch feels relevant when it directly affects the community their audience belongs to, so a customer in Christchurch talking about how your product changed their business is worth more than any amount of corporate messaging.
Practical details. Timing, embargoes, imagery, sensitivities. When can this go live? Is there a date it needs to land by, or a date before which it can't? Do you have high-resolution photos, and if so, are they any good? Are there things you can't talk about, investors who don't want to be named, competitors you don't want to reference? These things seem minor, but they save enormous amounts of back-and-forth later.
What makes a brief bad?
Bad briefs tend to share a few characteristics, and recognising them might save you from sending one.
Too much marketing language, not enough substance. If your brief reads like your website landing page, it probably isn't useful. Agencies don't need your value proposition restated, they need the raw ingredients underneath it. Strip away the adjectives and see what's left. If the answer is not much, that's the problem.
No access to the people who know the detail. Sometimes we receive a brief from a marketing manager who's been told to "get some PR happening" but doesn't have access to the CEO, the product team, or the customers. That's like asking someone to write a recipe without letting them taste the food. Your agency needs access to the people closest to the story, ideally directly.
Unrealistic expectations baked in. A brief that says "we want front page of the New Zealand Herald" isn't a brief, it's a wish. Your agency should absolutely aim high, but the brief itself should describe what you have, not what you want. The agency's job is to figure out what's achievable with the material you've provided and tell you honestly where it can go.
How do you brief an agency you haven't worked with before?
If you're working with a PR agency for the first time, the brief carries even more weight because the agency doesn't have any background context to fill in the gaps. They don't know your industry's politics, your competitor landscape, your founder's backstory, or which journalist already wrote about you eighteen months ago.
For a first engagement, include everything you'd normally include plus a short summary of your company's story so far, who your competitors are and how you're different (honestly, not in marketing terms), any previous media coverage you've had and how it went, and the names and contact details of two or three people inside the company who can answer questions when they come up. That last point is more important than it sounds. One of the biggest friction points in any new agency relationship is the founder who sends a brief and then disappears for a fortnight. Media moves quickly, and your agency will have follow-up questions within hours, not weeks.
Can you over-brief?
Technically yes, but in practice we've almost never seen it. An agency can always distill a long brief into a sharp pitch, but they can't conjure detail that was never provided. If you're unsure whether something's relevant, include it. A good agency will know what to keep and what to set aside.
The one exception is when a brief comes with creative direction attached. "Here's our story, and here's how we want you to pitch it" can actually slow things down, because the agency might see an angle you haven't considered. Give them the raw material and let them do the shaping, that's what you're paying them for.
How often should you brief your agency?
This depends on your engagement. If you're on a retainer, your agency should have a regular rhythm of strategy sessions where you bring them up to speed on what's happening in the business, what's coming up, and what's changed. At Payper, our retainer clients have strategy sessions between four and eight times a year depending on the tier, and those sessions are essentially structured briefing conversations.
If you're using an agency on demand, each project is its own brief. But even here, a quick five-minute call to walk through the brief after you've sent it can save days of misalignment. Tone, emphasis and nuance are hard to convey in a document, and a short conversation catches what the written brief misses.
The real answer, though, is that briefing isn't a one-off event. The best client-agency relationships involve a steady flow of information in both directions. If something newsworthy happens and you're not sure whether it's worth a pitch, tell your agency anyway. Let them make the call. That's what Payper does for our clients, we'd rather hear about ten things and pitch three than hear about one thing and miss the other two that were actually better stories.
Does a better brief really lead to better coverage?
In a word, yes. When Cision's 2026 report found that 86% of journalists immediately reject pitches that don't align with their beat, what they're really saying is that relevance is everything, and relevance starts with the brief. A well-briefed agency can target the right journalist with the right angle at the right time. A poorly-briefed agency is guessing.
We've seen it over and over with our own clients. When Evnex briefs us on a new product development, they come with data on market demand, customer feedback, and clear timing around their announcement. That's part of why they've maintained an EMEI (Earned Media Efficiency Index) of 2.90 across their time with Payper, meaning their earned media consistently delivers nearly three times the reach value of equivalent paid advertising. When Scapegrace launched into new markets, their briefs included tasting notes, production details and the specific story of how a small New Zealand distillery ended up on shelves in some of the world's most competitive spirits markets. That detail made the difference between a generic "NZ gin brand expands overseas" story and something a journalist genuinely wanted to write.
Payper is a results-based PR agency in New Zealand where clients only pay when coverage lands. That model only works when the raw material is good enough to produce results, which is why we care about the brief as much as the pitch.
A quick checklist for your next brief
Before you send your next brief to any PR agency, run through this list:
- Have you stated the news plainly? Could someone unfamiliar with your industry understand what happened in one sentence?
- Have you explained why it matters? Not to you, but to the audience a journalist would write for.
- Have you included context? The bigger story, the market backdrop, the "so what?"
- Have you offered proof? Data, metrics, customer quotes, anything concrete.
- Have you named who's available? Spokespeople, customers willing to talk, subject matter experts.
- Have you covered the practicalities? Timing, embargoes, photos, sensitivities.
- Have you left the creative direction to the agency? Give them the ingredients, not the recipe.
None of this is complicated. But getting it right transforms the output on the other end, and it's the easiest lever you have to pull if you want better PR results.
Get in touch here and we'll give you a straight answer.