How to sell your work (to your creative director) (in an email)

This article is for creatives who are relatively new to the advertising industry, but there’s plenty here that could apply to others as well. If you know of anyone who could benefit from this, please feel free to share, and if you have any thoughts and advice you’d like to add, please do so in the comments section. 

Much of this may seem like common sense while reading it, but at 11PM when you’re trying to get a deck out to your creative director, common sense isn’t always driving your actions. So you might as well soak it in now.

So what exactly should happen at 11PM, while you’re sitting in the office, waiting for the last team to finish their portion of work while the stench of empty-ish takeout boxes is making you both sick and hungry at the same time (“Nothing for me, thanks – I don’t plan on staying too late.” Right.)? What happens then? Actually, not very much. Because by then, you should have everything all worked out. Let’s go back and review all the things you did right, leading up to then.

It all starts at the Creative Regroup earlier that afternoon

Congratulations! Your creative director likes one of your directions, as well as a couple more from other teams. Oh, by the way, you all need to blow out the work for an internal meeting the next morning. Oh, by the way, your CD has to fly out to a client meeting and will have to look at the work on her phone “whenever it’s ready tonight.” Here’s where you offer yourself up be the one to compile the work into one deck and send the email. If you don’t do this part, there’s really no need to read any further.

Get agreement on timing and deck formatting from the teams

Timing is a pretty obvious one, though it’s rare for every team to be done by the deadline and that’s just how it goes. As far as deck formatting, try to get teams to make their work as understandable as possible, which means ordering it in a way that makes sense, with a page that delineates the start of the team’s work, as well as titling pages and/or sections clearly, and doing write-ups on pages where necessary. And each team’s work should be clearly grouped in order to make feedback easier. In early rounds, teams don’t need to be coordinated in look and feel. That’ll come together as the work progresses.

One thing I find helpful when exploring multiple art direction styles is to create title pages which explain the evolution of your thinking. For instance, one page might read, “The next three pages use a visual-dominant layout”. And later, “The next three pages use a type-dominant layout”. There’s an old saying about presenting work that goes something like this: “Tell them what you’re going to show them; Show them; Tell them what you just showed them.” Here, you’re doing the first two of those.

The email itself

Taking the steps above means you don’t have to say too much in the body of the email. And that’s the point – the shorter the better. If your message is rambling, your creative director won’t read it and may miss any important points – and come away with a less than enthusiastic impression of you. Here’s a bad message edited down to a reasonable one:

Hi Sam, hope you had a good flight. I hear Yazoo City can be hot this time of year! Anyways, I’m just writing to let you know thatattached is the work from all the teams. Everything is clearly marked. I just hope the file is small enough to send because otherwise you won’t even see this! Ha, ha. Anyways it’s getting late and I need to get home to check on my dog’s diarrhea situation, soI’ll be back online in about an hour if there’s any feedback. Thanks!

Don’t forget to cc the teams – and a brief word on cc’ing

For heaven’s sake, double check that the recipients’ names are correct and complete. There’s a potential for work to get shared with a freelancer who worked in your office whose first name is the same as someone on your team and who still comes up in auto-fill and who’s working on the same new business pitch for another agency. Don’t believe it could happen? It could happen.

A word on art direction in decks and formatting

There are a number of ways to put a deck together. PDF, Keynote, and Google Slides seem to be the three most popular. All of them have pros and cons, and sometimes it just depends upon what you’re making. If you’re coming up with activation ideas and time is tight and you just need to get ideas down, Google Slides is fine. But please, please, don’t attempt any art direction in Google Slides. Just don’t. Ultimately, the level of art direction varies depending on the situation, but like anything the better it looks, the more it stands out from the work from the other teams (assuming the concept is good). It helps to know how finished looking your creative directors prefer the work to be, so if you’re not sure, just ask. And then do it a little better than they asked for.

In short, if art direction plays a key role in the work, it’s best to do it in the appropriate Adobe product and then export it into the appropriate delivery format. If not, just be aligned on the format the creative director prefers to receive.

That’s it!

I’m sure there are more, potentially better ideas that have worked for others and if so, as I said at the top, please add comments.

In the grand scheme of your career, this may seem like small beer, as the Brits say. So why should you care? Because even as a creative person, you’re also a businessperson. And the sooner you understand how to conduct yourself in a businesslike manner, the better off you’ll be. Besides, every creative director has had problem solvers on their teams, as well as problem makers. Learn to be a problem solver.