Adweek published a lengthy perspective from Lytho Chief Operating Officer Russ Somers, presenting 5 Challenges Facing Creatives That Leaders Need To Address. Somers listed the issues as: 1) bad briefs; 2) winding review processes; 3) insufficient performance feedback; 4) shrinking timelines and; 5) viewing creatives as vendors and creative departments as production studios. There’s nothing new or groundbreaking in Somers’ opinions—in fact, it’s all such common knowledge, the piece feels like a collection of anti-corporate clichés.
What makes Somers so outrageous is that Lytho is a company selling products and services to enhance creative workflow and digital asset management. In short, the 5 Challenges are probably part of a PowerPoint pitch that Lytho uses to acquire customers. The perspective isn’t thought leadership; rather, it’s self-promotional poop—a 950-word advertisement for advertising agencies by someone who has never worked at an advertising agency.
Somers’ advertorial is missing yet another top challenge facing contemporary creatives: consultants. To rewrite a classic George Carlin line, “Most consultants don’t know what they’re doing, and a lot of them are really good at it.”
5 Challenges Facing Creatives That Leaders Need to Address
The industry’s obsession with measurement has scarred the creative process
By Russ Somers
The term “dark funnel” has become increasingly accepted in marketing circles. It reflects the realization that marketing attribution is an imperfect science. Yet, the dark funnel feels like déjà vu, a glitch in the matrix, because we’ve been here before.
The internet created an obsession with measuring clicks. It was a timely remedy to marketing’s long and troubled history with measurement. But we’ve overcorrected at the expense of marketing creativity.
We’ve focused on optimizing the plumbing that puts our messages in front of people. In the process, we became too focused on efficiency, optimizing our digital plumbing at the expense of the core function of marketing: remarkable messaging that influences behavior. Without that focus on a remarkable message, marketing becomes bland, and no amount of tweaking the delivery pipes can improve it.
Marketing leaders are awakening to the idea that we are poised for a creative renaissance. Yet creative teams will need assistance because our preoccupation with clicks has left the creative process, or at least marketing’s role in it, damaged and scarred. Here’s a look at what the challenges are and how to address them.
Inadequate creative briefs
“The brief is one of the most valuable and paradoxically most neglected tools marketers have to create good work,” according to one of the 1,731 respondents to the Better Briefs Project. The Project found that 80% of marketers believe they write effective creative briefs, while just 10% of creative agencies agree with that assessment.
Clearly, there’s a big disconnect. What’s missing is often the intended objective and clear metrics. As such, these briefs are reduced to, “Can you make it pretty?” or, “Can you make it pop?” This discounts the biggest value a creative team has to offer: problem-solving.
The solution is for creatives and marketers to spend more time collaborating on the desired outcome. Marketing must invite creatives to the strategy table. If that invitation isn’t forthcoming, creative teams should request it.
Define what you are trying to achieve and allow the creative teams, with their unique problem-solving skills, to help plan a path forward. Creative projects should start with a conversation, be documented in a creative brief and only considered complete when both sides agree.
Complicated review and approval cycle
Years ago, the creative team would physically walk an envelope with proofs around the office for review and approval. On the back of those envelopes was a list of stakeholders to provide feedback in a prescribed order. The digital transformation has changed that, and today everyone gives feedback all at once.
This has created two interrelated problems. First, there are too many stakeholders involved. For example, small teams of creatives frequently support the demands of 50 or more stakeholders.
Second, the review process is unnecessarily complicated with unclear lines of approval. Most creatives (83%) say projects can take up to five rounds of review. That’s a lot of turns, and it should be the exception, not the norm. If this happens frequently, something is probably wrong.
The solution is to develop clear lines of review that limit who has the authority to require changes and favor substantive over subjective comments.
Lack of performance feedback
Creative work is too often judged subjectively: “I like it,” or “It looks fantastic.” All those words are flattering but not useful.
Creative teams need to understand how well an asset performed. Yet 55% of creative content teams rarely or never get quantitative feedback. Less than one in five (17%) get quantitative feedback always or often.
Without a feedback loop telling them how their creative work performed, they can’t improve, and they can’t know their value to the organization. The solution is to ensure the creative team is part of a formal measurement process.
Volume grows, deadlines shorten, resources are flat
Creatives are being asked to do more on tighter deadlines. A survey of 400 creatives published last year found the top daily operational challenges facing creatives are the “speed at which they are expected to work” (73%), having enough resources (61%) and a growing volume of demand (59%).
This is a recipe for burnout and turnover. The solution is for leaders to maintain operational metrics in an executive dashboard to better prioritize and balance workloads. This enables leaders to think in terms of priorities, availability, workload and skill sets and make a case for delaying deadlines or bringing on more help.
Creative is viewed as a cost center
Marketing leaders don’t always understand the creative process. Few see the amount of sheer effort that occurs between a creative request and the final product. In a sense, creative teams have become viewed like vending machines for CMOs.
Vending machines are cost centers, and cost centers get outsourced as businesses seek ways to reduce costs. The quality of creative slips and, like an unvirtuous circle, marketing is right back to tweaking pipes.
The solution is for marketing leaders to get back in touch with their creative roots. Creative is the essence of differentiation and a key driver of revenue and profit.
Marketing is from math, creative is from magic
Marketing is to math what creative is to magic. Our profession has taken a long circuitous route, arriving at the dark funnel, before accepting that we need both math and magic to drive business results.
However, that journey has left creative teams feeling overworked, underappreciated and confronting exhaustion at a time when marketing needs them most. Our obsession with measuring marketing’s value in clicks has left scars on the creative process that we must mend. Hopefully, the steps outlined here can serve as a blueprint for getting started.
No comments:
Post a Comment