Handles are the undiscussed, maybe even gate-kept, tool that creative teams use at bigger ad agencies. It was a specialty of mine for over twenty years and I wrote them for some of the biggest campaign concepts in the country: Volkswagen, Dr Pepper, Playstation, Coors, Fisher-Price and many others.
I’m going to walk you through it and I guarantee that if you can learn this process, it will make you better at anything: writing, photography, design, songwriting, you name it. If it’s a creative endeavor where good ideas help you succeed, a handle is something that can help you.
What Is A Handle?
At an ad agency, strategy teams brief creative teams. They offer a background and pertinent information to help inspire ideas and ensure they are on strategy when they do. Then those creative teams have to present a whole lot of ideas, internally and then to the client. To do that, at big agencies, they don’t just start pitching script ideas. First, they read a handle, which describes their idea succinctly and tells you how they got to it, then they read the scripts.
The Handle Structure
Every agency does this a bit differently, I’ve seen a lot of variations on it. The one…
