Creative Craft vs. Savings, Scale, and Speed

As marketers and creative delivery professionals, we spend time and money creating powerful brand campaigns. Generating more and more content from different formats, for different audiences, and from test & learn approaches.?

The challenge is how we build workflows to reuse these creative solutions throughout the full communications funnel.

Sweat the assets through optimisation, but keep the brand quality high.

Below are three conclusions:

1.?When to create 'new'

A fundamental, but often missed step in the briefing process is to ask – what are we trying to achieve? Agree on the right approach for asset creation at the start. Where there is a need to create a new concept for a campaign, we should still think about optimisation. Presenting the campaign as a toolkit (masters, campaign packs being other terms) will shift it from being viewed as a static campaign to a modular one. A modular campaign will then have assets that can be stored on the DAM (Digital Asset Management system) or be captured in best practice campaign playbooks for future re-use?

2. Re-use isn’t a compromise

So rather than the brief always being for new work, the starting point for conversion activity mid-funnel should be first to see what’s available to re-use. This challenge comes from the brief owner (often wanting a new campaign) and the creative teams (wanting to make new). Tech helps both to review what already exists and what has performed well. It’s a mindset shift. Don’t view it as a compromise that every brief isn’t a highly crafted piece of creative. For savings, scale and speed, there is a need to connect workflows to adapt and automate what already exists. And there’s a cultural dynamic at play here, too. Respect the value provided by all disciplines. From the bespoke campaign craft to adaptions to gain savings, scale and speed.

3. Tech doesn’t replace creative humans

In creative marketing, there will always be the need to balance the human approach vs. the tools. You need good, robust workflows so you can trust the process and understand that tech isn’t going to replace high-quality creative solutions.?

It’s about freeing up human resources to do quality thinking and not the more repetitive tasks.?

When we understand what we’re trying to achieve – the requirement for new or scale will then determine the workflow. And don’t forget that people are still using workflows and need to want to use them. No point in having a DAM if the metadata isn’t consistent so creatives can’t search to find an asset to re-use. If there isn’t a consistent best practice you soon see end-users improvising with their own makeshift systems, such as sharing assets informally on email or chat channels.

The main point is understanding what you’re trying to achieve from the start. When we need the time and craft to produce master assets and when savings, speed and scale are paramount.?

Credits:

Henry Stewart Events,?www.DAMusers.com

Oliver Stewart from Celtra

Julia Anderson, Pritesh Patel, Deborah Charles, Amy Potts