Use your creatvity to promote your new online business

Bringing the branding idea to life – creative execution

This is when the Branding Idea takes on a whole new momentum, as it is developed into specific creative executions, across the specific media channels now identified. The process starts with a creative brief.

The creative brief

Together with the Brand Vision, the Creative Brief is a key focal point. It is where the thinking on the brand, the consumer and the media is distilled into a key thought which will help inspire the creatives to convert the Branding Idea into compelling executions across the defined media mix. As the name suggests, the brief should be brief:

A single-sheet distillation of the process
Single-minded.

Equally inherent in the name is that the brief should be instructive:

Take decisions
Give direction

Although the actual wording of the Creative Brief form tends to vary from agency to agency, most of these forms focus on the same six key issues:

Role for communications: for example reinforce existing behaviour, provide information, gain trial.
Target market definition: for example demographics, lifestage, lifestyle.
Consumer insight: the aspect of your target audience’s belief or behaviour which you are going to leverage (the stronger the insight, the stronger your key message).
Key thought: the single-minded proposition which you wish to communicate (this is the most important entry on the entire form – and the one which the creative team always look at first!).
Rationale: the key evidence which supports the ‘key thought’ (although this information won’t necessarily need to be communicated to the target audience, it still creates the vital discipline of ensuring that your key thought is valid and substantiated, and therefore likely to be credible in the real world).
Executional issues: for example tone-of-voice, or any mandatory inclusions, such as phone number, Web address, or a slogan. The most distinctive creative idea isn’t just the responsibility of the creative people; a poor brief invariably results in poor creative work, so think hard about what really matters. This is especially important if there is little time for the brief to be polished and refined. Here are some additional tips for giving the creative team the best possible direction:
Find ways of bringing the brief to life, using whatever stimulus you need. The emphasis is on the brief as a creative launch-pad. You will fail if you think of it as a dry and static marketing document.
Be realistic.
Don’t sit on the fence, without a point of view. Be courageous.
See everything from the consumer’s point of view (yes, again!). Write in the way you feel they would express themselves. Think about how they will respond to your communication.
Revisit your Brand Vision (which, by definition, should be wholly distinctive) and bring this to life. Does this Vision succeed in permeating the entire communications task?

The creative development process

Don’t keep a dog and bark yourself. Everyone can be an ‘advertising expert’, but given that you have hired highly-qualified professionals to undertake the creative execution, give these people room to develop their ideas. ‘Co-creation’ does not mean that every member of the team should actively work within every stage of the process. There are times when certain members of the team should be given the room to concentrate on their core expertise, using the remainder of the team as an informed source of opinion and encouragement.

Don’t use the creative process as a way of trying to refine your thoughts about the overall brand strategy – this is a very expensive and irritating way of doing business, and risks shortening everyone’s life expectancy. Assuming, therefore, that your brand strategy is sound, you’ll be able to judge the creative ideas entirely against this pre-defined framework. If you don’t like the proposed creative idea, stop and ask yourself whether this matters. The key question is: will your customers like it/notice it? If your target audience has a different taste and outlook to you, it may even be right that the proposed creative idea makes you, personally, feel uncomfortable. Ensure that clear lines of communication and decision-making responsibility are maintained:

Because the time pressures are usually so great, ensure that everyone is kept informed.
Decide up front who will take the final decision. Although teamworking can be vital, timing may mean that you have to nominate one person who takes primary responsibility for these decisions (and this is where you will later find that everyone else in the company becomes an instant expert, claiming that they themselves ‘wouldn’t have done that’). Get all of this sorted out up front and life will be easier for everyone.
Working meetings are important – often the best way is for the client and agency to work more closely together than they would on campaigns within more traditional categories, when longer lead times mean that there can be a greater independence. But remember that the point of this proximity is for you to act as a useful sounding board for the agency’s work-in-progress, rather than to get involved in the actual creative ideation.
Understand how the process feels for creative people – the idea is their creation, born of much blood, sweat and tears, and they may be very protective of it. See the world from their point of view and think very carefully about how you criticize their ‘child’.

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