What to do When Your Creative Team Just Doesn’t Get It

You’re not receiving great work from your teams or agencies. You feel like they’re not getting your ask or your brand. The RFP process is expensive and time-consuming, and you didn’t get anything you loved. Your creative team is giving you ideas that are missing something or just missing the mark.

There’s a good chance that creative team includes a someone who is aching to do what they’d deem meaningful work. The whole creative team wants portfolio-building work in the world, not just proposals. They may have a CEO or chief creative officer who has decided that awards are worth chasing and is exacting an insane amount of pressure on them to only produce award-winning work. You may have an account leader who is juggling two other existing clients and trying not to lose that business while pursuing yours. Your team is working hybrid or remote and maybe hasn’t physically been together in a room to jam on stuff, so not surprisingly the work — and often the presentation — feels disjointed, there’s a chemistry miss, or it’s utterly incoherent.

The agency might be trying to sell you a new capability: the traditional media company is now all in on influencer, the PR agency is flexing into integrated marketing, the ad shop is all about brand purpose and societal impact. They’ve poured money into IP and unfortunately for you, you’re the nail and that IP is the hammer. Pages and pages of their response attempt to reframe your challenge into something quite different and the ideas would require you to fundamentally change your business model in order to “break through.” You might be getting copy/paste or playbook tactics and you know that because god forbid they didn’t bother to find+replace a logo from the last time they trotted out that idea in another deck.

You may be frustrated because perhaps you gave them your style guide and what came back was completely off brand. Maybe the tone was just not right. Perhaps they didn’t bother to check if you or your competitors had actually done a very similar campaign to their idea just a few years ago.

You probably feel like you’re giving the same notes and feedback over and over and the work isn’t changing. And depending on where you are in the process, maybe they’re in the middle of production and you can just tell the whole thing is falling apart, it’s hurtling out of scope, and you?knew?this idea was never feasible in the first place!

So here’s the part where I suggest, this might be a you problem.

Yes, you very may well have issued a crummy brief. Was it super long? Did you ask for all the things? Did more than three of you write it? Did only one of you write it in not enough time? Wait, there was a brief, right?

I have spent years receiving thousands of client briefs and RFPs. The best brief I ever saw was from Mars (for a variety of reasons the agency I was at had to turn down the brief but I held onto that thing because it was just?that?good). It was one page, had a clear business opportunity, a challenge statement that felt like a call to arms, and just enough real consumer insight to not waste any time on a fishing expedition defining audiences. It was so focused and inspiring that you just wanted to get about coming up with ideas and finding those connections that would make a consumer go, “Oh! I see myself in that.”

I also once got a brief from a publisher that succinctly explained their heritage (business success and legacy) but stated they were rapidly losing readership and relevance to newcomers who had less authority but offered their news for free. The brief read, “bottom line, it’s not fair.” It was indignant, brilliant, and made me want to give their brand an unfair advantage in the market through an unmissable, powerful idea.

So before we get into what it takes to cultivate a culture of creative excellence (I’ll save that for another day), let’s start with your brief because writing a great one will save you money and heartache. Also, the better, more concise, and inspiring your brief is, the more likely you are to get the full attention of your creative team.

Cut to the chase and articulate the change you are navigating — about 80% of assignments or initiatives are kicked off because of a change in something, so be honest about the impetus. You will find that when you do this, the creative problem-solving dramatically shifts from tactical to strategic. Your brief isn’t being seen by competitors so it’s doesn’t need to be rosy or proud. You can say, “it’s not fair” (just make sure you have explained what?it?is).

1. Your company
2. What you make or do
3. What you’re in the business of
4. What you’re up against

Play with these terms and see some of the rough examples above and you’ll see that now we have a problem statement (what you’re up against) and with a clear problem statement, we can explore who’s talking about that change and who’s burdened by that new reality.

You creative team and strategist will be able to do conversation mapping, insights gathering, topic-graphic research or perhaps peel back what are usually three or four of the Cs (company, category, competitors, culture, community, conversation). It is their job to articulate the ah-ha, insight, or cultural fuel that inspires great ideas, so let them do that part.

Any strategist worth paying should orient the team around the “I ____ consumer.” Meaning, they’ll distill the above into an articulation of needs i.e.:

• the “I can’t have my oven not work on Thanksgiving morning” consumer (if you’re a Samsung)
• the “I can’t find performance wear that actually performs” consumer (if you’re a Lululemon)
• the “I just want to get home” consumer (if you’re Lyft)
• the “I don’t know how to stretch my budget” consumer (if you’re a Chime App).

Why does this work? Because it creates an immediate empathy device, with which you can start generating a boatload of solutions. Yes your brand can actually solve an un-met need! The team can jot these down in a structured brainstorm or just 5 minutes of quiet writing time. And these are where your creative team will start “what if’ing.”

• What if that was the other way round or upside down?
• What if we had unlimited budget?
• What if we had our budgets slashed?
• What if we could only use 2 channels?
• What if it was under water, had feathers, or had to sparkle at night?
• What if the idea had to go to franchisees?
• What if we wanted to influence legislation with this?
• What if suddenly it had to work for both holiday and all-year long?

You get the picture. But doing this Etch-a-Sketch shaking is as effective at improving ideas as spending 5 minutes jotting down all the tropes of the category — all the worst ideas. The ideas that would get them fired and for good reason.

We can talk another time about great creative briefs. I could write a book, give a seminar, and point you in the direction of vaults of versions. But this exercise is about what’s going on from the get-go that is not leading to great creative outcomes for you, dear client/CMO/CEO/Brand Manger.

So your brief should now include the following:

1. We are …
2. Maker of …
3. We are up against …
4. In a culture of …

Consider your competitors, key issues or challenges in the market, and omit all the internal acronyms and jargon, please.

Happy creative outcomes, favor clarity of thinking and concrete business objectives. So avoid vague terms such as ‘improve brand image,’ and the presence of multiple/conflicting objectives — awareness and conversion are both very nice, but knowing which your campaign creative will impact primarily will make for a much better working relationship with your creative team.

Go ahead and have some swagger. Describe what you offer that no one else can, where you feel you can grow, and explain how you got to now e.g. “We’ve been the #1 brand, category leader for 12 years.” Be honest about where you’re yes and’ing. Do you want ideas to generate growth among existing customers?or?does your business need to attract new consumers in order to maintain/grow? Remember, once you have landed a killer idea, your team can (and should) generate loads of mini activation briefs that scratch various itches and initiatives over time. Big, magnetic, clever ideas create elasticity.

Finally, be clear about what success looks like. What are you measuring? And by the way, if any of these are vanity metrics, be honest about those too. Everyone loves a KPI, a data benchmark, but we are human and there’s a lot of emotion in those “softer metrics” that a creative team would love to know about.

If there are significant constraints, state them openly and honestly. It will set the tone for a successful engagement. While it may feel negative, don’t worry –- a brilliant creative team will appreciate these and will turn them into Can/If statements for their own creative brief.

OK this is the last bit. But figure out:

1. How long it’s going to take you from writing a brief to the creative team/agency receiving it
2. Will anything change in that time? How long will it take to see first round ideas?
3. Do you want check-ins along the way? A second round?

I’m saying this because your project managers will love you and also you are?setting the expectations. And if we think back to where we started — hard feelings, disappointment, confusion: those things are almost always the result of mismatched expectations.

I hope this helps take away the sting from a bad working relationship with your creative team or agency and sets you on a path to game-changing creative excellence for your brands.

Perhaps next time we’ll look at what CEOs and Brand Managers can do to create enduring cultures and habits around creative excellence.