The integrated comms half of the brief is strong and already close to fully brand-aligned. "Runners buy progress, not sports nutrition" is the audience insight almost verbatim, and "Find out what you're made of" is a genuine platform-level idea. The piecemeal creative-brief half is where the drift is: it briefs deliverables rather than a campaign, and slides back toward product-led messaging in places. The builds below pull the whole thing up the pyramid and lock it to the master campaign model.

Two things to resolve before the wider team is briefed — both cheaper to fix now than after. They are flagged in full on the final page.

There are two core ideas live in the same document: "Find out what you're made of" and "Made of the miles nobody saw". Both are on-platform. They are not rivals — they are a hierarchy. Brief them that way so the creative team works to one governing idea:

Platform endline: Find out what you're made of.

Autumn campaign line: Made of the miles nobody saw.

Mandatory tag: #WhatFuelsYou

This is the Level 1 → Level 3 structure the brain asks for: Transformation platform, Achievement hook for the season.

The brief currently jumps from background to a deliverables list with no narrative spine. Give every asset a beat to play, using the five-stage master model:

Every item in the deliverables list should be tagged to one of these five. Right now they are tagged to nobody.

The comms brief opens at Level 1 (Transformation). The product statics and Beta lines risk collapsing to Level 5 (Product). The rule for the creative team: 80% of assets live above Level 5. Product is the answer to the training-block question, never the opener.

Not: "40g dual-source carbohydrate."

Instead: "Fuel the miles nobody saw" — then the science underneath.

The brief treats endurance runners as one blob. The brain and the audience analysis both say that's three psychographics with different emotional triggers. Same campaign, three topspins — which also gives the UK / USA / Japan teams a real framework, not just "add local topspin":

PB chasers (Competitive) — trigger: Improvement. Beta, race-day certainty, "fuel the performance you've trained for."

Committed everyday runners — trigger: Confidence. Training Packs, consistency, "never miss a session."

First-marathon challengers — trigger: Completion. "You've got this," step-by-step fuelling, reassurance.

The email series (Launch → Fuel Method → Gut training / Taper / Race week) already mirrors the runner's real timeline — that's the habit-loop play. Two builds:

Frame it as a coaching series, not a promo series. Email should be ~50% education — which this Gen X / Millennial, evidence-led, £147-LTV audience responds to far better than discount.

Make race-week the subscription moment. The taper / race-week email is the highest-intent point in the campaign — the place for "never run out before race day" (loss aversion). Subscription and second-purchase are the two biggest untapped levers in the audience data, and this campaign is the natural trigger to convert them.

The brief asks how to weave social proof in. The trust hierarchy answers it: Experience → Coach → Elite → Science → Brand. So the TRC shoot and Team SiS / ambassador UGC — real runners, mid-block, unglamorous — outrank the hero film for persuasion. Brief Sophie's and Abigail's toolkits to capture first-person "made of the miles nobody saw" proof, in the customers' own words.

Keep Beta on carbohydrate / fuelling / endurance claims — safe territory. The emotional platform ("what you're made of," resilience, courage) is brand wrapper and carries no product claim, so it's clean. The one watch-out: don't let the emotional line bleed into an implied performance-superiority claim on the product. Feeling on the campaign; fuelling on the product.

Both are strategic, not cosmetic — and both are far cheaper to settle now than after the wider team is in motion.

Flag 1 — The stated audience doesn't match the data

The creative brief targets experienced PB chasers — elite-leaning, race-performance runners. The audience analysis says the actual SiS base is "Performance Improvers … not elite athletes" — committed everyday runners who buy around events, then disappear. The brand brain explicitly warns against behaving as if the audience were elite.

This is a question only the client can answer: are we recruiting a new, more competitive audience, or speaking to the one we already have? The three-trigger split in Build 4 works either way — but which trigger leads the campaign depends on this answer.

Flag 2 — The endline needs an ownership check

"Find out what you're made of" passes the brand brain strategically — it sits cleanly at Transformation / Identity. But the phrasing is not distinctive, and it should be checked for prior use and ownership before it becomes the platform endline. Strategically sound is not the same as clear to run.

The integrated brief is nearly there. The build is: (1) make "Find out what you're made of" the platform with "Made of the miles nobody saw" as the season line; (2) force every deliverable onto the Tension → Transformation campaign model; (3) split the single "runners" audience into the three triggers so the markets and the CRM series have something real to execute against — once the audience question above is settled.

Science on the product. Feeling on the campaign. The athlete is the hero; the science is the proof.