Category Archives: Marketing

Enhancing Collaboration: Strategies for Marketing and Creative Team Integration

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Mixed teams working in an office.

In-housing, the practice of merging creative services with marketing teams within the same organisation, promises streamlined operations and enhanced collaboration. However, it often brings to light a universal and age-old tension between marketing and creative mindsets.

Sooner or later, in-housing encounters the same challenges that are familiar in client-agency relationships and sometimes even within agencies themselves (especially bigger ones). Those two cultures have always had to work together for creative marketing to work.

Effectively combining marketing and creative teams requires a specific set of skills. It comes with differing worldviews, cultural tensions and often knowledge gaps that have to be tackled.

Recently, I have helped multiple organisations with in-house creative teams improve their briefing process and the understanding of creative strategy across their marketing and creative teams. This tension transcends sectors, affecting B2B and B2C alike, from media to FMCG, Tech to professional services.

At some point every team has to find a shared language and values that help them bridge marketing and creative communications. You can’t have a high-performing team, effective briefs and briefing sessions or successful creative development without it. A designer who understands marketing objectives and a marketing manager who understands the creative process will always outperform those limited to their discipline and eyeing the other team with suspicion or snobbery.

In-housing just brings the pain home. You still have to solve it and bring people together. Training for shared knowledge across disciplines can be the first step. Reengineering processes and shaping tools and templates are of great importance. But it all can only work if it considers the business model and larger work culture, and makes everyone feel seen.

Whether you work in-house or with agencies, have you found effective ways to bridge the gap between marketing and creativity in your organisation?

***

Some of my other thoughts:
About AI
About creative strategy
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Selecting Your Creative Agency: The 4 F’s Approach

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As a client, how should you choose your branding agency? Advertising agency?
(or any creative agency, really)

It’s a tough decision. At the top, agencies will mostly look the same. But, on any shortlist, your candidates could seem interchangeable.

It recently occurred to me that the 4 Fs that agencies often use to evaluate prospective clients* can be flipped over client-side quite effectively:

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Taming Marketing Babylon

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Prompt: the tower of babel made of neon marketing ephemera against a stormy sky (MJ5)

It’s often said that the very things that initially attract you to someone are the things that eventually begin to grate on your nerves. This old saying perfectly captures my relationship with the marketing industry.

Early days, I fell in love with Marketing’s creative, “whatever works” approach. A magpie-like mentality to pick and choose the best concepts and strategies for success from our own as well as other disciplines. Yet, over time, I have become increasingly frustrated with the neverending onslaught of synonymous, mutated, and spliced frameworks, models, labels, jargon, and “stuff”. It’s bloody exhausting.

The tragedy of this situation is that the genuine ideas, original concepts, research and science that underpin our profession are buried beneath this barely held-together tower of shiny marketing trinkets. This dearth of context and historical understanding has led me to call my blog “Marketing Babylon”. Way back in 2006, when I was still a fresh-faced agency-side rookie.

The paradox of marketing is that the creative freedom we love is both our saviour and our tormentor. It’s what makes our industry innovative and adaptable, but it also spawns a convoluted mess that leaves most marketers befuddled and, frankly, less effective. And in a classic “it’s always the children who suffer”, it also stunts the growth of our junior team members, even those with some formal training. 

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What to ask in a job interview when they say “So do you have any questions?”

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There comes the point in most job interviews when the interviewer asks, “Do you have any questions?” 🤔
There’s plenty of content on how to answer questions in an interview, but not much about how to ask them.

Here are some of my go-to favourites, specifically for creative agencies:

🚪 Tell me the story of the last time you fired a client. How long ago was it? What happened?

I’m not saying agencies should fire clients left and right. The point is many of my challenging experiences in agencies were due to the combination of difficult clients and weak leadership with poor boundaries or little regard for the team’s mental health. It often required me to step in and protect the team at a personal cost. The answer can be quite telling.

🌱 What’s the background of senior people? Did they grow within the business? How quickly?

This question is great for understanding diversity and potential career paths.

🏆 Tell me the story of a project/campaign you are particularly proud of. Followed by:
More briefly, what are some past projects that are typical of what I’ll be working on?

These questions can reveal a lot about values, culture, and working style. Pay attention to: How long ago was it? What do they choose to mention/spend more time on? Where’s their passion (if it’s there at all)? Who gets the credit? How does the story reflect ways of working and client relationships?

• What’s your social media policy?

This little question can help you identify red flags around control and micromanagement.

💻 What are your remote work platforms/tools?

This gives you an idea of the company’s agility and overall relationship with technology. Are they still using outdated systems? Have they adopted tools like Slack, or do projects still happen on endless “CC everyone” email chains? Do they think about AI?

💸 Towards the end, don’t just negotiate your starting salary. Ask – What is the typical policy/rate for raises, and how long after starting the job does it usually happen? What about for over-performance?

With most agencies, getting a raise can be like pulling teeth, especially the first one. Compensation should be more straightforward, and the culture surrounding it can reveal a lot. Growing, successful organizations tend to be competitive and honest. Even if the answer isn’t your ideal, it provides a guideline for future negotiations.

🤩 Don’t fall for the one nice room. Ask to have a walk around the studio.

Observe the entire work environment as it reflects the business’s health and the team’s priorities. Also, what’s the vibe? Do people seem happy? Relaxed? Stressed? Are there rushed individuals or playful teams?

What are your favourite questions to ask? 🧐

AI and creative development: Rocket fuel for human creativity?

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Rocket fuel for human creativity? 🚀💡
Hear me out…

I have spent most of my career leading teams in the quest for breakthrough solutions (and searching for them myself). The typical process combines two approaches: quality-dominated development of “new stuff” and quantity-dominated curation of “existing stuff”.

1. Quantity dominated: curating numerous references to existing stuff in the hope of discovering inspiration or direction. Mood boards and best-practice research both work that way. This approach is cheaper, faster, and less demanding. However, this approach might not result in the desired breakthrough due to its dependence on previously explored concepts.

2. Quality dominated: developing fewer bespoke things that have not existed before. Think of a quality storyboard/draft/wireframe or even good scamps. It is slower and requires creation and iteration, mindfully mining opportunity spaces. It’s quite resource-intensive (time, money, energy, attention, people) to reach even a rudimentary prototype.  

Typically, you start in quantity mode and progress to quality, then alternate between the two. 🔄

Enter a third, hybrid mode of strategic creative development, which has an interesting “serendipity acceleration” effect. This the agile-adaptive approach that AI unlocks. It mixes our original ideas with a vast field of references (wider than any human can hold in their head). 
It can start at either end and can rapidly move to the other:

– Quality to quantity: You develop a significant bespoke seed and feed it to an LLM, trained on existing references, to rapidly generate new results for you to iterate. 💡➡️🌐
– Quantity to quality: you use prompts to generate a large number of starting points which, in the absence of bespoke seeds, gravitate more towards the existing references, but take a “quantity is quality” approach and select the best of those to develop and craft further. 🌐➡️💡

Note how the typical shift between divergence and convergence thinking, crucial to success, becomes faster and more cost-effective.

The third mode cultivates a dynamic and responsive creative process. It’s like rocket-fuel for serendipity, turbocharging the creative journey and maximizing the chances of finding that elusive ‘Eureka!’ moment. By leveraging human-machine collaboration, this approach accelerates not only serendipitous discoveries but also enables rapid generation, iteration, and refinement of ideas, making it easier for creatives to reach “terminal velocity” in their pursuit of breakthroughs, all while reducing the cost and time required.

It’s already happening, don’t get left out.

Version 1.5 of “The Sceptic’s Guide to ChatGPT” is out.