Text is one of those things “that no one reads” until they do, and it can make or break a treatment. Most treatment texts are too long, too vague and not answering the right questions. Not anymore.
Detailed treatments win pitches. In fact, they matter even more to clients than they do to directors. There are several reasons for that: the client's budget is on the line, so they need to understand every single word to happily buy your vision. Executive producers need to grasp the director's vision to outline the budget, which is increasingly tight, so every line does matter.
In a visual industry like advertising, we're trained to believe imagery does the heavy lifting, that references and design alone can win the pitch. But the best tip we can give you is this: winning a pitch is much more about showing that your vision is intentional and executable than relying on premium visual references or a slick layout. Despite all the factors that play into a bid, we find that how well a director communicates their thinking is the biggest factor of all.
Every person involved in this business has watched a gorgeous treatment lose, regardless of its sleek cover, flawless type and moody stills. In almost every case the visuals were fine; the problem was the read. That's because the treatment failed to understand the people reading it.
Detail is what fixes that. The more precise your treatment, the closer they come to the film.
So what does it mean to write a detailed treatment?
01 · Realise You're Not Writing for Yourself
Your tone and personality come through, but you're writing for the client, for the brand. And if you've worked with brands, you know they're obsessed with their product. They want to hear you talk about it with the same passion they do, even if that means repeating just how game-changing their products are.
For example, here is a director writing for themselves:
“I have always been drawn to brutalist architecture, negative space, and the poetry of silence. My work lives in stillness, and I intend to bring these obsessions to this project. The product will feature in the closing shot.”
Everything in this passage orbits the director. The brand appears in one sentence, at the end, as an afterthought. The reader learns plenty about the filmmaker's taste and nothing about how the film will serve the campaign.
Now a director writing for the brand:
“We want the audience to feel that the car is carrying the most precious cargo this family owns: its history, and everything it hopes to become. So rather than lining up the usual performance scenes, we let capability itself tell the story. The strength of the machine and the strength of the family become one subject.”
The product sits at the emotional centre of the idea. The director found a way to make the car's capability, the exact thing the client wants celebrated, carry the meaning of the film.
Pro tip: During the briefing call, write down the creatives' key words: the way they describe tone, mood and intention. Then use those exact words across your text. The treatment feels aligned, the agency feels heard, and you signal that you already speak their language.
02 · Describe the Shot
Some of the most respected writers in history became known for their writing because of its descriptive qualities. Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, to name a few. Screenwriters do this, too. In advertising, time is limited, so the trick is to rely on rhythm, sensation and texture, as opposed to literally describing a scene.
For instance, imagine you're a director who's been given a script about a girl whose dream is to be a writer, and her first step towards that dream is to buy a typewriter.
“Our character writes her first page since acquiring a typewriter”
The option below makes it far more tangible. Instead of describing the script, which the client already knows about, it transmits the sensations, visually, that the character may be experiencing:
“TAP. TAP. CLACK. DING! A typewriter hums into action. The tempo builds. Words appear across the page. Each sentence reveals another piece of Elena's story.”
As you can see, the passage embodies the sound. The mechanical rhythm of the keys whips us through visions; we hear the “TAP,” “CLACK” and “DING!” of a life being imagined in real time. This turns the transitions into storytelling devices.
Pro tip: Onomatopoeia pulls the reader into the fantasy and brings the character's world to life. Stylized language can animate a scene.
Another example:
“We see a beautiful shot of the car driving around the city.”
The sentence above claims the shot is beautiful without showing us anything that makes it so. Compare it with the version below, where the writing itself carries the image:
“Our hero lifts a disposable camera and snaps a photo. Click! We cut straight into the next scene, the photograph becoming our transition. One moment flows into the next through seamless visual matches: a hand waving from a taxi dissolves into the sway of palm trees in another country.”
Pro tip: Here the transitions carry emotion, and the writing mirrors the rhythm of real experience. Every frame belongs to a visual language that reinforces the director's tone.
03 · Take the Brief Seriously
When evaluating a treatment, agencies are looking to see whether you understand the months of groundwork behind their crafted campaign. From experience, directors tend to take the client's brief and creative deck for granted, and end up losing pitches. That's because they fail to see the brief for what it is: the client's worldview.
Winning directors read the brief like detectives.
They look for the client's tone, values, intent, red flags, cultural nuance, and pain points. We know the brief is often less than ideal. But it's not the director's job to fight it, at least not at this stage. You want to win them over. Once you get the job and the agency is accustomed to you, you can try to make adjustments more aligned to your vision and style.
Script changes tend to be welcome, but be careful as the client may perceive heavy changes to their script as early pushback from the director, and that's not the best impression, especially when the idea has probably survived endless rounds of client approval. The tricky thing with agencies is that every one of them works differently; some guard their original scripts fiercely, while others hand over a placeholder, hoping you'll take it somewhere new.
Pro tip: Unless it comes up in the briefing call, there's no way to know which room you're in. That call is your first, and sometimes only, chance to learn what's sacred, what's open, and what's expected.
What Next? If this resonates with you, we'll be sharing more deep dives into the craft of treatment writing and design. Let us know if there's a topic you'd like us to explore next.
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