Want to know how to get better creative work from your team?
You may think that creatives need to be allowed to run free without constraint like some sort of wild stallions. The truth is that without clear objectives you’ll only up with headless chickens.
Many marketers believe that SMART goals fall within the strategic part of campaign development. Yet every part of the SMART acronym is crucial to the way we tackle the creative process.
Smart Objectives
Specific is the single-minded proposition every creative needs to develop the most effective concepts and communications. It is far, far easier to convey one message in a clever, memorable and unique way than to try and cram in three, four, five selling points.
Measurable helps us understand what we’re trying to achieve. Is the main objective to create awareness, generate leads or perhaps change perceptions? Knowing this will dramatically affect our positioning, creative execution and the channels we use.
Assignable is important with our particular way of working as we use multiple creative teams, media planners and digital strategists who all work together
simultaneously to drastically speed up the process.
Realistic goals are crucial as they keep the entire team motivated and most importantly you’ll be able to measure whether the campaign was a success or not against achievable targets.
Time-related is perhaps the one we hang our entire reputation on. We believe being slow to market is one of the most damaging things you can do to a brand, leading to lost opportunity, lost ground and lost revenue. It’s why we guarantee a delivery date for our campaigns and to a pre-fixed budget.
Smart Thinking
With a single-minded proposition, clear objectives in place and with everyone knowing what they need to do and by when, the creative process should be straight forward.
Now it’s simply a matter of using creative thinking to persuade your audience in the most effective way - whether that’s inspiring, informative, thought-provoking, funny, conventional or disruptive.
Keep it Diverse
If the brief had been answered and the objectives met, judging the creative output will be subjective. That’s why we have three different creative teams work on the concept part of each campaign. In our experience, it’s a unique approach that has multiple benefits.
It provides our clients with three unique and fresh concepts with solutions seen from every angle. It dramatically speeds up the creative process by eliminating the need for rounds and rounds of feedback and changes. In fact, every time we have run a Campaign Accelerator with our clients, they’ve been able to choose their preferred campaign than is then immediately put into creative development. This is all down to scrutinising the brief, being braver with ideas and harnessing teams in a creative way that has the goals in mind, not the agency bottom line.
Understand your Process
Campaign creation and development as a process has intense moments of concept productivity and down time too. There are times when you feel exhausted, but it's usually worth pushing through, as this is where the richer territories are. Down time can be useful to reflect. It's definitely true, that sleeping on an idea can speed up development. Incomplete thoughts can lead to gold. In the past we've had a collection of ideas which need a campaign wrapper and other times where there's an exciting campaign platform and nothing underneath. This is when working with others and fleshing out those ideas further is a great way to stress test. We only present campaign ideas that have been through this process.
Once we do this, some organisations like us to develop the campaign ideas into mvp campaigns to test with key accounts or straight to market to get some initial feedback.
This is brave, but does stop procrastination and gives you direct customer responses.
It also speeds up the process and can get your campaigns to market much faster.
Creative development is just one of five stages of the Campaign Accelerator. You can read about them all in these five short blogs. Or contact us and we can chat about how The Campaign Accelerator can help you get to market much, much more quickly.