by Johanna McDowell (@jomcdowell) Mike Schalit, CCO of BBDO South Africa, recently conducted the “Evaluating creative against strategy” IAS Masterclass for Marketers, delivering real practical ‘takeaways’ that marketers should be able to use and implement immediately in their dealings with their agency creatives.
Many good points came out of the discussion and many questions were posed by the marketers, with lots of important learnings and interest. The easiest way to summarise these are in 10 points:
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Creative people are competitive
They love hearing how their work has worked in the marketing space and whether the client achieved great results as a result of the creative work. So Schalit recommends that the client shares how well a campaign has done with the creative team— measurement is important, sales, brand awareness and whatever else is relevant to the marketer and marketing environment.
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Encourage mistakes
It is OK to be wrong; something good will always come out of an apparent mistake. Encourage mistakes — release creativity .
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Recommended reading
“Think like a Freak” from the same authors as “Freakonomics”, Stephen J Dubner and Steven Levitt.
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Is creativity an inexact science or a bastard art?
So once the marketer has bought into the creative idea, the difficulty then comes to ‘sell’ it onto the rest of the business or C-Suite. The recommended course of action here is to ensure that the logic backing the idea is clear — and acts as the bridge to the idea, making it relevant. It is like selling poetry with maths, says Schalit.
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Finding the humanity in an idea
This means that marketers need to be in touch with their consumers as much as creative people need to be.
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Can the big idea work everywhere? (Snickers case study)
To illustrate much of what was being discussed, the Snickers work was showcased. “You are not you when you’re hungry” has been a highly successful campaign in the US and the UK, and it is a global brief with measurement criteria and briefing guidelines which were worked upon by agency and the marketer together.
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Three of the hardest words to say
“I don’t know.” But, of course, it is very difficult to always know the answer to everything. By saying “I don’t know”, marketers (and agencies alike) demonstrate a willingness to learn and share.
Perhaps one of the hardest words of all is “maybe”. Using “maybe” might seem like an uncertainty but it is an opportunity to open up and solve a situation together. The value of the word “maybe” in a discussion around creative solutions is an interesting phenomenon.
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Golden rules for evaluating creative
- Relevance is the measure: is the idea relevant to the brand and its strategy? You don’t have to like the idea; it just has to be relevant.
- Instinct vs rules: sometimes rules have to be broken — trust your instincts, be the consumer. Sometimes marketing may act as a ‘straitjacket’ and smother the idea.
- Look for the human truth
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Trust creative people.
If you cannot trust your agency, find another one. Marketers cannot work with agencies where there is no trust in the output and outcomes of work. There will always be research and this can only help to make a campaign stronger and more robust — but trust is key to success.
Virgin Atlantic and the Guinness work in Africa (both BBDO clients) were used to illustrate this particular point.
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Avoid change for changes sake.
Don’t try and be creative; leave that to the creative team. Unnecessary changes lead to costs and a dilution of the main idea. This also goes back to trust.
For someone who professes not to do these types of sessions very often, Schalit’s content and delivery were exciting and absorbing. Ten leaders in marketing around the table were fully present for almost three hours!
Johanna McDowell (@jomcdowell) is managing director of the Independent Agency Search and Selection Company (IAS), and she is one of the few experts driving this mediation and advisory service in SA and globally. Currently she is running the IAS Marketers Masterclass, a programme consisting of masterclasses held in Cape Town and in Johannesburg. This particular masterclass is going to be run again by Mike Schalit during Loeries Creative Festival Week in August 2016.
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