On the Treatment Document
The treatment is where a campaign earns its conviction.
The treatment is where a campaign earns its conviction. Not the brief, not the board — the treatment.
Most agencies produce treatments that read like enthusiastic mood boards: a palette, a vague "tone", and a director's reel. What they miss is the argument. A good treatment doesn't show you what it will look like — it persuades you that this is the only way it could look. It closes off the alternatives.
The treatments I've built — for SEAT with Gondry, for IKKS, for Audible — start from a single unlocking idea. A formal constraint, usually. A structural choice that forces everything else into place: the aspect ratio, the casting logic, the colour temperature, the sound design approach. Once that's there, the document writes itself.
What changes when a treatment lands: the client stops asking "can we also do X?" They stop treating the film as a brief to be fulfilled and start treating it as a proposition to protect.
That's the shift. From negotiation to conviction.