The GACC Marketing Brief: The best framework we’ve created

Goals. Audience. Creative. Channels.

Marketers spend too much time on busy work. This is a trap we fall into as marketers when we focus on quantity of work instead of impactful work from the start.

Enter the GACC (not the nickelodeon slime stuff from the 90s—throwback reference for other “old” millennials). The GACC is our version of a (brief) marketing brief. I evolved this framework while leading marketing at Asana and we continue to use it with startups we advise. GACC stands for goals, audience, creative/unique take, and channels/distribution.

When you are planning a campaign, writing a blog post, deciding the focus of an event, or creating anything longer than a Tweet, you probably need a GACC. Writing the GACC in advance helps give your future creation focus, sets context for reviewers, and ensures you have a plan for driving results.

Here’s what we’ll cover in this newsletter:

1. Why use the GACC and how to use it

2. Break down of the GACC acronym

3. Marketing jobs from our job board

The importance of the GACC

We have 2 main principles in marketing we encourage everyone to follow to ensure you are focused on and driving impact:

1. Everything you create as a marketing team should ladder up to a perception and/or an OKR, otherwise it should be deprioritized—at least for now. There are sometimes exceptions to this rule, but I can’t think of many.

2. Everything you create should pass the “add value” test. If it doesn’t add value to your audience specifically and is simply duplicative, really ask yourself if it’s worth making at all.

The GACC makes sure you and your team follow these principles, which results in better work, which results in short-term and long-term growth gains. The GACC is the best framework I’ve ever developed. I mean I haven’t developed that many frameworks, but this unverified claim would still stand if I developed 100.

Order of operations: Develop OKRs, perceptions & a marketing roadmap or calendar. Then for everything you produce, write a GACC, then create it, then distribute it

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