Optimizing the Creative Process (Full Day)

How to Inspire and Enable Your Agency to Develop Great Work
(Full Day Workshop)

Great creative work is the result of a successful collaboration between you and your external and/or internal agency partners. Your creative process can make or break whether you go to market with a big idea that builds your business or a small idea that lacks relevance and engagement. Successful collaboration needs the right people involved, in the right way, at the right time. While many clients think they have a streamlined, effective creative process, ANA studies show that agencies continue to voice concern.

Briefs drive successful collaboration. It is well known and accepted that the agency side creative brief is the foundation of the agency’s creative work. Less well known, or accepted, is that your client-side brief drives development of the agency’s creative brief in the first place. Client-side briefs are called by many different names including an assignment brief, a project brief, a campaign brief, a communications brief, and still others. However, for many agencies, the client-side brief is no more than an email or ten-minute phone call. In the other extreme, the client-side brief can include unnecessary, unfocused information that is anything but brief.

Subpar client-side briefs combined with a lack of productive collaboration with agency partners leads to disappointing creative work, an inefficient process including many extra rounds of creative revisions, and a frustrating relationship. Before incurring the time and costs of agency staff developing creative concepts, ANA studies show that what agencies need most from their client-side marketer partners, from you, is a more relevant, insightful brief, and more dialogue with you throughout the creative process, especially in the beginning.

This workshop gives you all the best practices of an optimized creative process. You will gain vital skills for effective client-side brief writing and understand industry best practices on how to provide an actionable client-side brief for your agency(ies). You will learn how to give feedback to an agency creative brief as well as on creative concepts before they go into production. You will learn how to nurture the big idea and “sell in” creative ideas at the right time to gain buy-in from senior executives and colleagues. You’ll learn an approach to pilot an optimized creative process from which you can test and learn.

Who Is This Workshop For?

  • Those who want to learn a best practice creative process, from brief through internal sell-in, and optimize their creative process starting with a pilot
  • Those who want to learn brief best practices from client and agency perspectives, how to provide effective creative feedback to the agency, and inspire creative teams
  • Great introduction for those new to the creative process and a welcome refresher for seasoned professionals
  • Relevant for client-side marketers who work with an external and/or internal creative team/agency

Workshop Benefits

The benefits of attending this workshop fall under the following key drivers of growth: improving marketing effectiveness, increasing marketing efficiencies, and increasing employee satisfaction.

This workshop helps attendees improve marketing effectiveness by teaching them:

  • Best practices in client-side briefs, agency creative briefs, and creative feedback
  • How to improve collaboration by aligning on creative direction prior to initiating creative development

This workshop helps attendees increase marketing efficiency by teaching them:

  • How to decrease rounds of creative revisions through better upfront strategic alignment
  • How to reduce the need to repeat process steps by engaging management throughout the entire process, from the initial client brief through selling in your recommended creative concepts internally

This workshop helps attendees increase employee satisfaction by teaching them:

  • How to reduce agency and agency staff turnover through more clear, insightful engaging, inspiring briefs
  • How to develop and scale an optimized creative process

Download the full agenda here


Faculty:


  • Dina Shapiro

    Dina Shapiro is the founder of Yorkville Consulting. She is a member of the ANA Faculty with more than 20 years of marketing experience ranging across internal and external stakeholders and touchpoints. Dina teaches Elevating Your Creative, Optimizing Agency Relations, Integrated Marketing Communications, and Integrating Across the Organization.

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