Filling in Form BV-01

Open the intake. Sit down with one real client. This takes about twenty-five minutes the first time and under ten after that.

The form's own instruction is the right frame: "Fill this in once per client, then keep it." Not fill it in and file it. Keep it — you will be back.

1BV-1 — Brand identity

How they sound, described by comparison — it's easier than describing it directly.

Three brands you'd want to be mistaken for

Any category. You're naming a tone, not a competitor.

That second sentence is the one people miss. If your client sells pans, do not list three pan companies — you'll capture the category, not the voice. Reach wider: a magazine, an outdoor brand, a restaurant. The further from their category, the more the answer is about tone rather than positioning.

Ask the client. If you can't, answer it yourself from their shipped copy and mark it as your reading rather than their statement. An inferred answer that's labelled is fine; an inferred answer that looks confirmed is a problem.

Three you'd never want to sound like

Usually faster to answer, and usually more useful.

Both halves of that hint are true and the second is the interesting one. Negative examples constrain harder than positive ones. "Never a wellness cult, never a crypto ad, never a hotel breakfast menu" rules out a great deal of specific badness — the false intimacy, the manufactured urgency, the corporate blandness — in nine words.

This is also the fastest question to get an answer to on a call. People who struggle to say what they sound like will tell you instantly what they'd hate.

If your brand were a person at a party, how would they talk?

Write it as behaviour, not adjectives. Who do they talk to, what do they refuse to talk about, do they interrupt?

This is the highest-value field in BV-1 and the instruction is the whole trick: behaviour, not adjectives. You are describing conduct, which is checkable.

A good answer reads like the demo brand's: "Answers the question you asked, then stops. Would rather say 'we don't know yet' than fill the silence. Talks about the object, never about the lifestyle."

Every clause there is a rule you could enforce on a draft. Would rather say "we don't know yet" governs how the brand handles uncertainty. Talks about the object, never the lifestyle is a whole content strategy in eight words. Compare that with "honest and grounded", which is what the same client would have said if you'd asked for adjectives.

2BV-2 — Audience & niche

One real person. "Everyone" is not an answer and a model will punish you for it.

Who is this for, specifically?

One person you could picture. Age or job title alone isn't enough — what are they doing ten minutes before they see this?

The ten-minutes-before question is the one that turns a demographic into a person. "Renters in their late twenties" is a segment. "Deciding whether to cook or give up and order in" is a situation, and situations are what hooks attach to.

Write it long. This field goes into every brief verbatim, per Module 2's generation skill, so compression here costs you on every script afterwards.

What do they already believe that you're reinforcing?

The easy half. This is what makes them nod.

Whatever goes here, your copy can assume without stating. That's what makes an opening line feel like it was written for someone rather than at them.

What do they believe that you're trying to change?

The hard half, and the one that decides the hook.

This is the field that most often exposes that a brand hasn't thought it through — and asking it is genuinely useful to them, not just to you. If a client can't answer it, that's worth surfacing.

3BV-3 — Guardrails

The things that get a video pulled. Worth more care than the rest of this form combined.

Claims you're legally or contractually barred from making

One per line, in the client's own words if you have them in writing. If you're unsure whether something is barred, put it here and ask them — that's cheaper than the alternative.

"In the client's own words if you have them in writing" matters more than it looks. A paraphrase of a contractual bar is not the bar. Copy the clause.

The uncertainty instruction is the important one, and it inverts the usual instinct: when in doubt, over-list. A claim wrongly on this list costs you one conversation. A claim wrongly off it costs you the account.

Off-limits words, phrases and humour

One per line. These are matched literally against your drafts below, so write the actual word.

Literally is the operative word. game-changer is a rule. "Avoid hype language" is not, and the checker cannot act on it.

Two sources for this list. Ask the client for theirs. Then add your own from Module 2 §1's tell list — game-changer, obsessed, literally, honestly — even if the client never mentioned them. The client's list keeps you compliant; yours keeps the output from sounding generated. Both belong here, and this is the field that quietly does double duty as the de-genericiser.

Paste a draft line to check it

Optional, and the only part of this form that does anything clever.

Paste a real line. Watch it black out the words on your list.

The form is scrupulous about what this is: "A literal string match, not a judgement. It cannot catch tone, implication, or a claim phrased three different ways — those are still your job." §3 of this module is about the part that stays yours, and claim-guard is the tool that does more of it.

Sponsorship disclosure

Write down what they told you and when they told you.

Note the two halves — what, and when. The date is part of the fact.

The form is deliberate about not asserting a rule here: "Disclosure rules differ by platform, market and contract, and they change. We are deliberately not printing a rule here for you to rely on." Ask the client, check the platform yourself, record the date, re-check per campaign. The Last confirmed field exists so that a stale answer looks stale instead of looking finished.

4BV-4 — Deliverable specifics

The boring half. It is also the half that arguments are about.

Format, length, platform, revision rounds, who signs it off — a name, not a department — and turnaround, from approved brief to first cut.

Two of these do more work than the rest.

Who signs it off, as a name. "Marketing" cannot approve anything. Every delay you will ever have on a deliverable is an approval delay, and they are almost all caused by not knowing whose yes counts.

Revision rounds included. Write the number and what happens after it. This is the only field that decides whether an over-running job is a negotiation or an argument.

BV-4 also overrides the templates: Module 2's generation skill treats the client's stated length and platform as authoritative over any default.

5Part-filled is fine. Blank fields are information.

The form says it: "a part-filled form is still worth filing — the gaps are information too."

A file with BV-3 complete and BV-1 half-done tells you exactly where the next client conversation should go. It also lets Module 2's skills work in the meantime — they'll generate against what's there and tell you plainly what was unconstrained, which is far better than waiting for a perfect intake that never arrives.

The one exception is barred claims. With BV-3's claims list empty, nothing downstream can clear a draft — claim-guard reports unchecked, not clean, and it is right to. Fill that field before anything ships, even if the rest waits.

6One file per client, revised over time

The intake tool shows several client files at different revisions, one not started. That is what this looks like after three months, and the revision letter matters: when a client changes a rule, you update the file and bump the revision, so you can tell which version a script was written against.

§5 is where the finished file stops being a document you remember to open.