Why the order matters

There's a lot of talk about what we need to do differently in a post-COVID world. (We’re all holding on to hope that such a thing exists right now, so just bear with me.) But despite what has to be different, there are a great many things which need to stay the same. And the order of things, in a marketing and print management context, is one of them. Here’s why.

Imagine you’re someone who dreams up a brilliant campaign. You chat to your agency, and give them a brief, then they come up with some amazing creative. You’d then take that to a print management company to get costs for the print. But often the quote isn’t what you’d hoped for and you’ve blown the budget before even getting started.

By doing things in this order, you've raised expectations way above what your budgets can realistically achieve. You might have fallen in love with the creative your agency has come up with, but if you can’t afford to actually get it printed and distributed, then it’s not a lot of use to you.

What we are certain about

One of the things that is a certainty for the next 12 months at least, a great many businesses are working with much tighter budgets.

Producing your creative first and only thinking about print budgets afterwards is a little bit like handing your kids the Argos catalogue at Christmas (yes, that’s how old I am!) and saying, “Tell me everything you want,”. Then only after they've made you their very expensive, very exhaustive list do you say, “Ah, but the budget was only ￡50.”

What you're left with is a very disappointed child who's dreamt big and is expecting lots and lots of things. They’ve suddenly had their expectations dashed and now you’ve got to pick up the pieces.

That's kind of what happens when you engage your creatives and let them dream big on your behalf before checking out whether what you're thinking of is affordable. Then what happens is the inevitable trimming – print a few less, use a lighter-weight of paper, reduce the size, only run the campaign for so many locations or with a reduced target audience. What you end up with is the poor relation of the campaign that was dreamt up in the first place.

The right things in the right order

If you'd have had a conversation about print in the first place, using the skills of your print management company to give them a budget, a direction and a clear idea of what you’re trying to achieve, you could have put together a specification for your creative agency so that they could still have dreamt big, but within the confines of the budget that you've got.

Then any ideas that your creatives came up with would have been affordable. You wouldn’t have to adjust your expectations. You wouldn’t have to be a bit disappointed. You wouldn’t feel like you were settling for something that wasn’t all it could have been.

We call it Value Engineering. It doesn't mean it's cheap and it's rubbish. It just means that we take the specification you have and advise on how it could be done to a tighter budget. We look at paper weight, size of the product (it’s amazing what you can do when you know how big a roll of paper is, and understand what will be wasted if you print at certain sizes). So you get the very best product possible and can be confident you’ve made the most of your budget.

Because once you realise you can’t afford what your creatives have designed, you’ll trim the spec and need them to redesign things to fit anyway, wasting more of the money you could have put towards producing the thing in the first place.

And that's why the order matters.