How NOT to respond in an agency creative presentation:

I often see a new person on a marketing team get invited to a creative presentation from an agency that’s presenting work started before they joined the team. The most common thing on their mind as they walk in is, “how will I comment on this when the agency, or my boss, asks me what I think?” Generally they just respond with some comments about whether the ads look nice or not – which is really just a waste of air in most cases.

So what should they do? Well, the most important piece of feedback the client needs to give the agency is whether or not the creative is on strategy or not, followed by whether or not it is well executed (and therefore elicits the desired emotion and response from the viewer).  In order to comment on the strategy, you need to have it written down somewhere. So the first thing you should ask if you are the new person who gets asked to sit in on the creative presentation is, “where is the creative brief?” You can only assess if the creative is on or off strategy if you have something to compare it to.

Here’s how to respond to a creative presentation:

1. If you have a strong gut reaction, give it, but perhaps not as your first comment.
2. Even if you have lots of negative comments, try to start with something positive. Creative people need encouragement.
3. MOST IMPORTANT – Compare what you see to the Creative Brief and especially to the Advertising Strategy (Benefit, Brand Character, Design Theme). You have to have an Advertising Strategy to do this and it should have been in the Creative Brief. Your most important assessment and feedback is: is this ON STRATEGY or OFF STRATEGY.
4. Either send a follow-up email after the meeting summarizing your comments and requested changes or ask the agency to send you a follow-up email containing that.

For more perspective on why and how to write a good creative brief, check out this post.

You can purchase a detailed Creative Brief template with notes and explanations at www.bestcreativebrief.com, one of my sites.

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When you hire an agency to make a marketing piece for you, do you take the time upfront to write out a detailed Creative Brief? Most people don’t, but great marketers do. As an Assistant Brand Manager at Procter & Gamble my Brand Manager always insisted that I write one. I often resented the time it took, just like I resented much of the process P&G forced me to follow as a new hire there. I was a young punk right out of business school and I knew everything. I just wanted to call the agency and tell them over the phone that I needed a direct mail piece made. But then I eventually became a Brand Manager and I too insisted that my staff take the time to write a creative brief before every project that involved contracting an outside agency. So what happened to me?

Well other than becoming Proctorized, I became convinced that the upfront time invested in a Creative Brief pays out in spades versus the “just call the agency and then add new requests every few days for the next month” method.

The purpose of writing a creative brief is to clarify our thinking upfront and to force us to make decisions at the beginning of the project so that the agency can start working on it with a complete picture of what we want. This process allows the design and production process to happen efficiently and therefore less expensively. People who don’t take the time to write a creative brief frequently end up making many changes to the requirements of the project during the project and this causes rework and ultimately leads to missed deadlines, higher costs and frustrated designers and agencies. A good creative brief should be so complete that if we handed it over to the agency and disappeared for the duration of the project, the end result should be pretty close to what we wanted.

Objection: If I spell all this out then why I am I paying my agency so much? Isn’t this their job.

No it’s not. The client owns the “strategy” (the content of the Creative Brief) and the agency owns bringing that strategy to life creatively. They are very different skills. Strategy is primarily about research, numbers, analytics, decision making models, and ultimately making clear choices. (In a small organization it is often just knowledge we have about our organization and stakeholders that we can’t expect the agency to know combined with some careful thought around the options and a sense of where we want to go in the future.) The creative process is about taking dry, sterile words and miraculously turning them into ideas and eventually executions that resonate, and produce emotion and action from the target audience.

Good agencies need the information in a Creative Brief in order to produce creative material that is “on strategy” for your brand. If we don’t give them a Communication Strategy then we are expecting them to create one for us out of thin air and that’s not their job. Their job is to take our Communication Strategy and bring it to life creatively in the elements we have asked for.

When we see their creative concepts or executions we should compare them back to the Creative Brief and ask, does their creative version communicate the message we asked for, even if in different words? If yes, then their creative is said to be “on strategy”, which it needs to be. If no, then their creative is “off strategy” and needs to be revised.

You can purchase a detailed 20 page Creative Brief template with notes and explanations at www.bestcreativebrief.com, one of my sites.

Thank you for visiting www.strategycube.com

A Creative Brief or Design Brief template is a must for any marketer who works with agencies. You’ll go back to this document template every time you start a new creative project and it will save you hours of rework and frustration later in your project. This template contains detailed descriptions of each section and how to develop the brief.

20 pages: 4 page template and 14 pages of real sample creative briefs that you can copy + 2 cover pages. The sample creative briefs are from real projects we’ve worked on over the years covering websites, web contests, TV and radio ads, and sampling & in-store elements like POP and shelftalkers.

JUST ADDED: BONUS Audio Podcast (33 mins) from Jonathan explaining how to get the best possible creative and how to develop an expert brief.

If you are pressed for time – this is for you! This hard-to-find complete solution has everything you need. Even if it saves you 30 mins it will have paid out and it will save you much more time than that. Don’t waste your time with the amateur free templates out there. This is the real deal, developed and used by Tier 1 CPG marketers.

Download options include a zip file containing Microsoft Word 95-2004, Word 2008, RTF, PDF and plain text versions that will work on PC and Mac or individual file versions that will work on PC and Mac. The template is in English. After you pay for the item you’ll be served a link to a page with the download links on it. Download time will depend on the speed of your internet connection.

Price: US $ 27.  

We guarantee your satisfaction. If you purchase this and are not completely satisfied we will refund your money. Thank you for purchasing from www.strategycube.com

What customers are saying:

I am writing to thank you for creating “The Creative Brief” with such great detail, instructions for completing it and especially for the clarity of where the responsibility lies for providing the information before creative concepts can be started.  I have been a designer for over 25 years and should have been instructing my clients to complete a document like this all along. It would have saved a lot of time and frustration and a few clients along the way!  Your topics, comments, file formats and audio clips make this an easy to understand, complete and invaluable resource!

Thank you,Jeannette Stutzman
Owner & Creative Director/Acme Graphic Design