Abandoning a good idea in favour of what looks like an even better one is always a risk.

But Richie Taaffe and Andrew Peacock decided it was a risk worth taking when they pivoted from providing a service that connects creatives to building an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that addresses one of the most frustrating problems experienced by those working in creative industries: the poor client brief.

“Initially, having noticed that more and more talented people in advertising were choosing to go freelance, we started a service to connect talent directly with brands, assembling bespoke teams around each client’s brief,” says Richie Taaffe.

“A few projects in, however, we realised there was a much bigger problem we needed to fix: the brief itself. This was not new to us. It was a problem we’d both experienced continually during our careers. We had lived and breathed the pain of bad briefs across every market we’d worked in, and the same problem exists everywhere.

“Equally, we’d also seen how great briefs unlock great work, and that was the inspiration for the formation of Deece Creative Technologies,” says Taaffe.

“Deece is a purpose-built AI platform that closes the brief gap,” he adds.

At its core is a brief builder. This gives marketing teams the ability to brief with more strategic clarity, he says, by drawing on learning distilled from hundreds of the world’s most effective marketing campaigns over the past 25 years.

Alongside these are curated marketing-specific insights and trends. “Relevant case studies of effective campaigns can be incorporated directly into the brief, giving agencies real-world learning and inspiration from the outset,” he says.

When questioned, most marketing professionals believe they brief their agencies very well. Agencies take a different view.

This disconnect, which was uncovered by a global study published by the World Federation of Advertisers, showed that 78 per cent of marketers thought they provided briefs with clear strategic direction, but only 5 per cent of agencies agreed.

“The result is misdirected marketing campaigns which contribute to the loss of an estimated 33 per cent of marketing budgets globally, equivalent to approximately €370 billion a year,” says Taaffe.

“The problem isn’t that marketers don’t care about their briefs. It’s that most of them don’t have the tools, the training, or the time to write them well. Briefing is a skill that’s rarely taught, yet it’s one of the most important things a marketer does.”

Unlike general-purpose AI tools, Taaffe says Deece has been built specifically for marketing effectiveness and trained on strategic learning distilled from hundreds of award-winning campaigns.

“These campaigns have been recognised for their real-world commercial results, not just creative merit. This means that the intelligence behind Deece is grounded in what has actually worked, across markets, industries and campaign types,” says Taaffe.

“Much of the AI innovation in marketing to date has focused on the execution stage: generating copy, images, videos and other content. Deece focuses on what happens well before that,” adds Taaffe. “Get the brief wrong and everything that follows is wasted, no matter how well it’s produced. We address the problem at the source, before the wasted effort begins.”

The Deece platform also provides users with guidance to ensure advertising claims (around sustainability, for example) are accurate and substantiated, and in due course more new features will be added, including campaign effectiveness analysis and flags to highlight potential legal, regulatory and greenwashing pitfalls.

Taaffe and Peacock met as Commerce students at UCD, and although their careers have taken them to different parts of the world, they have remained friends with ambitions to start their own businesses.

“I don’t think we necessarily thought we’d do something together, but the idea was good, and the time was right, so we joined forces,” says Taaffe, who moved to Australia in 2010.

He stayed there for eight years, during which time he took on senior roles with TBWA Australia, McCann and Clemenger BBDO. Before setting up Deece, he worked as a marketing and advertising consultant. He joined Three Ireland in 2021 as head of marketing communications.

Andrew Peacock began his career on the Jameson graduate programme with Pernod Ricard before moving to London and subsequently to Dubai to work in senior agency roles leading global activity for high-profile accounts including Etihad Airways, Dubai Economy and Tourism, Unilever, Amazon and Ford.

The co-founders, who are based in Dublin and Dubai respectively, began teasing out their idea for Deece in 2024 and now have the platform working exactly as they want it.

“We recruited an experienced CTO [chief technology officer] to join us, and when the prototype was developed, we tested it with brands at the top of their game,” says Taaffe. “We’re targeting businesses at enterprise level, so it has to meet a certain standard, particularly in relation to data security, which is really important to us. We didn’t want to launch until we were sure everything had been fine-tuned.”

Deece was soft-launched in March this year and its potential customers are the senior executives who lead marketing teams in mid-to-large organisations. The revenue model is SaaS and the company is also looking at licensing the platform. Deece already has paying clients in Ireland, the UK, the UAE, Australia and New Zealand.

Investment to date has been in the order of €100,000, made up of personal and Enterprise Ireland funding. “Because we built most of the platform in-house, we have been able to keep development costs lean, but the €100,000 figure does not include the considerable investment of founder time involved,” says Taaffe.

Despite having wide experience in the corporate sector, Taaffe recognised that there’s a world of difference between working for big companies and starting your own, and this encouraged him to apply for the New Frontiers start-up programme run jointly by IADT and NovaUCD.

“New Frontiers gave me far more than a stipend. It provided mentorship, knowledge and the experience of going through the start-up process alongside a cohort of fellow founders at a similar stage,” he says. “Beyond Enterprise Ireland, the broader start-up ecosystem here has also been valuable, and being based at Dogpatch Labs has given us access to support and a very vibrant start-up community.”