Last month, I covered the best way to review creative ideas like ads, Web sites, press releases.
This month, let’s add hard-won knowledge about how to give specific creative feedback without de-motivating your creative team.
Remember, you job isn’t to solve the creative problem, it’s to tell the creative team what problem to solve in order to make their communication ideas more powerful.
I like to begin the feedback meeting by noting what worked well to keep the creatives from changing the good parts when making improvements. State why one approach seems to work more than another, identifying a useful principle to use now and in the future. For example, “I notice that ads with people in them seem to feel more joyous than those without, and ‘joyous’ is our strategy.”
In an ad, I try to identify where the power is, and exaggerate that with creative direction. Is the emotional power in the visual? Make the visual bigger. Is it in the headline? Make it more dominant. Is the power in the design? Eliminate elements that clutter or decorate the design. Creatives may not know where the power lies in their creations; this gives them practical direction for improving.
Then I review the work on four levels, giving feedback: strategy; idea; craft or execution; and production and politics.
Always create a strategy before the ad. If an idea is not on strategy, reject it, bring it back on strategy, or fix the strategy before asking for another round of creativity. The message strategy is what you want to say. The creative idea is how you say it. The creative idea should be unexpected. Otherwise, your ad won’t get noticed — a total waste of money. The average American will spend less than half a second deciding whether to pay attention to your ad. So you need a fast-working hook, to zig where others zag. This idea, put up against a wall of competitor’s ads, should stand out.
A creative idea should also be extendable, suggesting variations on a theme, like different celebrities with the same milk mustache, or different artistic treatments of the same bottle shape. A great idea can usually be described in a single sentence and creates a feeling. It has a halo effect, meaning more than it literally says. Most ads don’t have a single idea; they are mere collections of information destined to be ignored. Also, executional tactics (cool typeface, snazzy computer graphics, “exciting” words like “razzamattaz”) are not ideas.
Let’s say you’ve got a good ad; it’s on strategy and has a great idea. It is still possible to “plus it” in execution through creative direction. For example, the successful tagline “Think Black Ink” for Williams-Young (since renamed) started out as “Bleed Black Ink.” Adding the rhyme made it a better line. This is the area of craft or skill. There is a craft to writing, art direction, photography, illustration, design and layout, acting, music, lighting, casting, etc. Books have been written on each of these areas, and a good creative reviewer has studied them or tried their hand at art so they have an artistic vocabulary.
There are certain general creative principles that work repeatedly in every medium. Unity. Everything working together towards a single end, nothing included that doesn’t fit. Dominance. Some things more important than others; provide a clear path of attention and importance for the reader or viewer. Voice or tone: are the words chosen or people cast? Are the colors used consistent with the right feeling or personality or emotional tone? Craft is the area where most clients try to play creative, often dictating specific suggestions that make ads worse.
Finally, there are production and political practicalitie. Is the idea affordable, realistic within the time frame, and executable within the chosen media technology? This takes knowledge and experience and often the help of an expert like a print or broadcast producer. Creative communications are like clothing a client is asked to wear. They are well within their right simply to say, “This isn’t me.”
The final stage of a creative review is to agree, both verbally and in writing, who will do what to which creative object next, and what useful principles have been discovered.
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