Prompting for Marketers: Good Prompts Are Good Briefs

My first job in media was an internship in community management for GZSZ.de, the website of one of Germany's best known TV shows. That turned into almost seven years at Mediengruppe RTL, where I eventually became Germany's first official social media manager, responsible for more than 100 profiles with over 20 million fans. The biggest lesson from those years: when a result was bad, it was almost never the team's fault, or the agency's. It was the brief.

'Just do something cool for social' has never once produced a good post. Today I build AI products as an AI consultant at BE BRAVE AG and co-founder of ORION AI, and I watch marketers repeat the same pattern every day: they type two lines into an AI tool, get generic mush back, and conclude the model is useless. The truth is less comfortable. The prompt was the problem. Good prompts are good briefs, and briefing is something marketers already know how to do.

The model is your most talented freelancer

Think of a language model as an extremely fast, extremely well read freelancer on their first day at your company. They can write in any tone and know every format, but they have no idea about your brand, your audience or your red lines. Would you shout 'write me a newsletter' at this person on your way out the door and expect something usable? Exactly. Yet that is what most prompts look like.

At RTL, every show had its own voice. A daily soap sounded nothing like a casting show, a news brand sounded nothing like either, and mixing them up was a serious mistake. No copywriter and no agency could guess those differences. They needed context, sample texts and clear boundaries, or you got average work back. A model needs exactly the same, in writing, in every single prompt. It has no memory of your brand unless you give it one.

Five building blocks every prompt needs

Whether I was briefing an editorial team in Cologne back then or briefing a model today, the structure has stayed the same. Five building blocks belong in every serious brief, and therefore in every serious prompt. Leave one out and the model fills the gap with the statistical average of the internet. And average is the most expensive result marketing can produce.

• Context: what is this about, what is the occasion, what should the result achieve? The model only knows what you tell it.
• Brand: tone, attitude, ideally two or three real sample texts. Showing beats describing, every single time.
• Audience: who reads this, what do they already know, what should they think or do afterwards?
• Format: channel, length, structure, language. A LinkedIn post is not a newsletter and not a landing page.
• Prohibitions: cliches, superlatives, topics, legal limits. Whatever must not appear goes into the prompt explicitly.

Prohibitions are the underrated half

From 2017 to 2019 I ran digital communications at Phantasialand, a theme park with around two million visitors a year. You learn quickly there that what you leave out is half the job: no promises about waiting times, no pictures from areas still under construction, no wording that touches safety topics. That list was part of every brief that left my team, and it saved us more trouble than any creative idea ever earned us.

That same discipline belongs in your prompts today. Tell the model explicitly what is off limits: certain stock phrases, price promises, competitor names, claims with legal risk. Models drift into pleasant sounding ad speak if you let them, and they will happily write superlatives your legal team would never approve. A clear list of prohibitions is the fastest route from 'sounds like AI' to 'sounds like us'.

Iterate instead of hunting for magic words

The biggest mistake in prompting is the search for the one perfect incantation you find once and reuse forever. That is not how I ever worked with an editorial team, and it is not how models work either. First draft, concrete feedback, second draft, maybe a third. That is not a weakness of the tool. That is simply the process good work comes from.

When we produced the first professional Facebook livestream of a Klitschko boxing match at RTL, together with Vidpresso, the setup did not stand on the first attempt either. We tested, adjusted and tested again until it held up live. Treat your prompts the same way. Give precise feedback like 'shorter', 'fewer adjectives', 'use a concrete example from the text above' instead of starting over in frustration. The second round is almost always the one where it gets good.

Build yourself a briefing library

As CEO of a full service agency in Cologne I saw how much time drains away into briefs that repeat themselves. The answer back then was templates, and the answer today is the same. Create a base prompt for every recurring task, one that already contains brand, audience and prohibitions in clean form. Per use, you only change context and format. Most of the prep work simply disappears.

Across the more than 30 AI products I have taken live by now, from content automation to live translation for streams to voice agents answering phones, the real value sits exactly there: in cleanly documented, tested prompts. That is your new brand manual. Maintain it like one, version it, and whoever joins your team works at the level of your most experienced colleague from day one.

The bottom line: you already know how to do this

Prompting is not a secret science and not a new profession. It is the skill good marketers have trained for decades: saying precisely what you want, for whom, in what form, and what must not happen under any circumstances. If you have ever properly briefed an agency or an editorial team, you bring everything it takes.

My suggestion for this week: pick one single recurring marketing task and write a real brief for it as a prompt, with all five building blocks. Compare the result with your previous two line attempts, the difference will be obvious. And if you would like to discuss how to set this up systematically across your team, get in touch. I am looking forward to the conversation.