From Brief to Bot: Why Creative Professionals Already Know How to Prompt AI
Prompting IS creative direction
If you’re a mid-career marketer, creative lead, or small business owner trying to make AI work without sounding like everyone else, you’re not behind. You’re overqualified.
When I took NJIT’s AI Prompting certification course, I learned that prompting was not some mysterious skill reserved for tech types or 23-year-old growth hackers. The course taught techniques and confirmed what I already knew from 20 years of writing briefs: the smartest input still comes from upstream thinking. Prompting was something that creative professionals like me were already doing. I’m talking about creative briefs.
If you work with agencies and creative teams, you know the creative brief very well. I’m talking about a real brief. Not a templated checkbox with “brand tone” set to “professional yet casual.” I mean the kind of brief that kept me up at 9:37 p.m., tabs deep in stakeholder docs, turning direction like “can we make this feel more fresh” into something that my design team wouldn’t quietly resent me for.
A solid creative brief takes business goals, distills them into a concept, and gives a creative team the structure and inspiration to bring it to life. And for those of us who write them, we’re already doing the work of a prompt engineer.
We just called it strategy.
And this skill set is what makes the difference between strategic AI output and the generic AI slop that comes from filling in the blanks on a template downloaded from a LinkedIn influencer. You know, not unlike a templated checkbox. Your AI content strategy benefits from your expertise as a creative professional.
Read on for tips on prompt engineering for creatives.
Prompting Isn’t a New Skill. It’s a Reframed One.
Prompting isn’t this mysterious new craft. It’s creative direction. Except you’re directing a robot assistant instead of a human team. And just like briefing a human team, garbage in equals garbage out. Like a brief, your prompt has to carry the weight of clarity, context, tone, and intent. Creative directors, marketing leads, and content teams have this skill honed to the point of instinct. The same is true with AI for content marketers.
If you’re a creative professional asking yourself, “how is AI going to affect my marketing career?” then I hope to give you some reassurance in this blog. The best output comes from human + AI content collaboration.
If you’re a CMO, team leader, or founder wondering, “how does AI fit my marketing strategy?” then I hope to share some strategic use cases to make AI less mysterious and more practical. There are AI tools for CMOs, copywriters, creatives, and literally anyone on your team.
When prompting AI, take the same elements that you would put into a creative brief. A brief follows a structure. So does AI prompting. And like a very smart and obedient junior designer, AI wants to please and will do exactly what you tell it. This means your input can’t be vague. Examples help. You can even have Q&A with AI to make sure your direction is understood before it begins the work. The same due diligence that leads to stellar output with a human team stands when working with AI.
Turning Creative Briefs Into AI Prompts: The Direct Translation
If you want to know how to prompt AI for marketing, let’s look at some examples. Here are some real life examples comparing creative brief input to AI prompting. Notice the nuances in creative brief AI prompting.
Creative Brief: "We want to sound smart but not smug."
Prompt Translation: "Write in a confident, knowledgeable tone, but avoid condescension or overexplaining. Think calm authority, not TED Talk energy."Creative Brief: "We serve busy SMB owners who don’t have time to read jargon."
Prompt Translation: "Explain this concept in plain language for time-strapped business owners. Assume they’re skimming on their phone between meetings."Creative Brief: "Our brand voice is irreverent but never unkind."
Prompt Translation: "Write with a dry sense of humor, like a seasoned creative who’s seen it all but still gives a damn. Never punch down."
Make sense? The difference is specificity. Since you are dealing with a robot that takes things literally, your prompt uses straightforward language with examples, what to do, and what not to do. This gives AI guardrails to work within and leaves fewer things open to misinterpretation.
What to Include in a Great Prompt
Like creative briefs, prompts can take on many shapes providing the information is presented in an organized way. There’s no fixed way to prompt. In fact, make prompting your own to yield more nuanced and original results than just copying from a template. Treat prompt templates like a starting point to get the hang of it. Customize the prompts until they sound like you, because anyone can copy and paste from a template, but only YOU bring that unique combination of experience, perspective, and human strategy.
This is what sets you up for strategic AI prompting versus an intern with a prompt library. This is where seasoned creative professionals bring value to organizations that want the efficiency of AI with the expertise of a human strategist.
All great prompts have these elements in common:
The business goal
The target audience’s mindset
The tone (with examples or references)
Constraints (word count, format, no-go phrases)
Brand voice: samples of content, style notes, headlines that represent the brand (or yourself)
Prompting isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being intentional. These aren’t rules, they’re guardrails to help you from drowning in a sea of generic slop.
What Not to Do
Don’t expect magic from vague prompts like “Make this engaging.” Engaging means different things to different audiences.
Don’t assume AI knows your tone. Show it. Provide examples of tone that you want it to follow. This works for what NOT to do, too: Give examples of what you don’t want.
Don’t outsource taste. You still need to edit, reshape, and reinsert the soul. I personally like to start and end in my own voice. However you use AI, it’s your human expertise that shapes the output.
Iteration Is the Creative Process, AI or Not
First drafts should never be final. This applies to human creatives and machines. With AI your job now is to prompt, assess, refine, edit or even rewrite completely. Treat AI as a partner for exploration, not execution.
Want something with more energy? Prompt again with sharper tone instructions. Need your intro to hit harder? Feed it a better hook to mimic. The tool is as good as the input, and the inputs are only as good as the human providing them.
The Upside for Seasoned Creatives (And Marketers)
If, like me, you’re mid-career or beyond, I have good news: you’re not behind. You’re built for this. AI doesn’t diminish the value of your experience. AI actually makes your experience more necessary. Quality AI output requires someone who can think upstream, shape the message, and guard the brand voice.
That someone is you.
Want Help Turning Chaos Into Strategy?
I translate brand strategy into smart content. I also provide AI content training for teams to think like directors, not just operators, when using AI. I can offer AI writing training for marketing teams and share how to scale content with AI and brand voice. And I provide AI help for small business owners who need an affordable, scalable way to keep up with the demands of marketing content.
If your AI content feels off, flat, or just not like you? Let’s fix it.
Book a consult if you’re looking for a seasoned copywriter who doubles as a certified AI content consultant. Because your brand deserves better than average output from a bot and a canned prompt.