How to Write a Single-Minded Proposition 301 (Half Day)

The Ingredients to the One Most Important Thing to Say About your Client's Product
(Half Day Workshop)

The most difficult sentence to write on a creative brief is the Single-Minded Proposition. It has many other names — One Key Thing, Unique Selling Proposition, Single Most Important Thing — but one purpose: To inspire creatives to come up with the Big Idea. When it’s poorly written, it makes a creative brief weak and uninspiring. As a result, it makes the creative work weak and ineffective. This workshop will dissect the inner workings of this simple but challenging sentence. You will come away with an insider’s understanding of how to craft a sentence that will ensure the two requirements of all advertising: creativity and ROI.

Led by the author of two critically acclaimed textbooks, How To Write An Inspired Creative Brief and How To Write A Single-Minded Proposition: Five Insights On Advertising’s Most Difficult Sentence. Plus Two New Approaches, and a former ad agency creative director, this workshop breaks down the ingredients that influence every SMP. You’ll examine how and why they work, and practice the techniques strategists and account planners use so that you can achieve similar results.

Packed with individual and group exercises, this course will polish your skills in the creative process and improve your marketing effectiveness, efficiency and ROI.

Who is this workshop for?

This workshop is for mid- to senior-level marketing and brand professionals who consider themselves proficient at writing inspiring creative briefs, but who want a deeper understanding of the Single-Minded Proposition.

Pre-requisite: Highly recommended that participants take “How To Write An Inspired Creative Brief” full-day workshop.

Workshop Benefits

The benefits of attending this workshop fall under the following key drivers of growth: improving marketing effectiveness, increasing marketing efficiencies, and maximizing marketing ROI.

This workshop helps attendees increase marketing effectiveness by teaching them:

• Examples of highly effective and inspiring SMPs
• Actionable skills to improve the quality of your SMP writing
• How to articulate your brand’s attributes with clarity and assurance

This workshop helps attendees increase marketing efficiency by teaching them:

• Best practices to writing clearer and focused communication objectives

This workshop helps attendees maximize marketing ROI by teaching them:

• The ingredients of an inspiring Single-Minded Proposition to improve writing from your own people

Download the full agenda here

Howard Ibach

Howard Ibach is an award-winning copywriter & creative director, corporate trainer, podcast co-host, and author of two critically acclaimed graphic textbooks, How To Write An Inspired Creative Brief and How To Write A Single-Minded Proposition. He has been a vocal advocate for creative-brief education for twenty years, the last seven on the faculty of the Marketing Training and Development Center for the nation’s largest client-side trade group, the Association of National Advertisers.

For 26 years, he was an award-winning brand and direct-response advertising copywriter and creative director. He worked at legacy ad agencies, notably Hoffman York & Compton in Milwaukee; DDB Direct, Team One Advertising, Direct Partners, Brierley & Partners, Rubin Postare & Associates, OgilvyOne, Grey Direct West (now G2) and Wunderman in Los Angeles; Carlson Marketing, Campbell Mithun and Asset Marketing Services Inc., a major retailer of collectible gold and silver coins, in Minneapolis.

In 2021, he and his friend Henry Gomez, VP/Director of Strategy at Zubi Advertising in Miami, launched The Brief Bros., a weekly video podcast on briefs, briefing and advertising. They have recorded and aired more than 180 episodes so far, including interviews with Mark Ritson, Luke Sullivan, Jon Steel, Bob Hoffman, Steve Harrison, Dave Dye and many others.

In 2023, Howard launched The Creative Brief Archive on his website, the first repository of finished creative briefs written by professionals and students and categorized by brand and ad agency. The Archive is free to anyone who wants to read, study, download and comment on briefs.

Howard is also the author of the critically acclaimed and award-winning memoir, Already Home: Confronting the Trauma of Adoption, and a short biographical sketch, Remembering Stanley Holden: Seven seconds the ballet world will never forget. He lives in Southern California.