Creative professionals are some of the most friendly, fun, and hard-working people you will meet. Why, then, are so many creatives so unhappy in their jobs?
It’s not the money. Rather, many creative professionals feel unsupported and underappreciated, hamstrung by a lack of trust, cooperation, and respect. In a multitude of ways, their employers and teams fail to recognize that creative professionals—copywriters, graphic designers, animators, and more—are a different breed, with vastly different needs than other professionals.
So what can you do to help your agency or in-house marketing creatives stay happy, productive, and doing their best work? Here are nine ideas to start.
1. Provide clear direction.
It’s more than common sense—it’s common courtesy: If you ask creatives to create something for you, then you need to tell them what they need to know to do the job.
You are the subject-matter expert, after all.
This is where the creative brief comes in. A well-written creative brief explains the who, what, where, when, why, and how of a job.
Starting a job with a strong creative brief gives everyone a road map for success. Starting without a creative brief, or with a poor one, virtually guarantees confusion, frustration, and extra work for everyone. The end result, usually, is a marketing piece that fails to do its job effectively.
Some do’s and don’ts for providing clear direction:
DO:
- Provide a well-written creative brief at the start of every job.
- Hold a short kick-off meeting if team members agree it is helpful. (Spoiler: It is.)
- Identify all deliverables needed for a campaign’s success. For example, a creative brief for a series of lead-generation letters should include direction for any fulfillment letters planned to be sent to respondents.
- Be willing to answer questions. Creative professionals need to understand every aspect of the campaign if we are to write and design an effective piece.
DON’T:
- Drop by a creative’s desk and say, “I need a brochure. Can you work your creative magic?” Go through the proper channels and put some thought into communicating your request.
- “Dump and run.” That is, email a writer or designer with dozens of pages, PowerPoints, and reports and expect them to sort through it all to find the relevant information.
2. Offer constructive feedback.
Once your creatives have put together a copy draft or layout, it’s time to review their work to see how well it aligns with the strategy and brand standards.
When providing creative feedback . . .
DO:
- Stay focused on objectives. Focus your feedback not on subjective factors, but on how well the work does or does not meet the objectives stated in the creative brief.
- Be clear and specific. Instead of asking, “Can you make this pop?” (ugh), try “What can we do to make this callout more visible?”
- Ask questions. If something seems off, ask, “What was your thinking behind [this part of the work]?” Your creative may have missed the mark—or she may have come up with a solution no one else had considered.
- Discuss client feedback with your creatives. If an outside client challenges the work, allow the writer and designer to respond with a rationale for their strategy. Hold a quick meeting with the client if he or she is amenable. Don’t simply buckle to the client or allow the account manager to make the change on her own.
DON’T:
- Dictate solutions. Clients are not writers. They are not graphic designers. Nor are account managers or marketing strategists. Instead of telling your creatives what to do, explain your concerns and then let us solve them.
- Push personal preferences and subjective opinions. Do you hate the color orange? Keep that to yourself. Confine your feedback to issues that affect whether or not the work aligns with campaign strategies and brand standards.
- Write or design by committee. More heads are not better than one—especially when the superfluous craniums belong to armchair creatives. Leave the writing and design to the professionals.
- Resist new ideas. If we show you an approach that’s different from anything the client has done before, we’d like you to share it with the client—not kill it because “they won’t like it.” Unless you can read minds, let the client tell you what they think.
- Let the legal or compliance department run amok. Legal’s job is to keep the company from getting sued, not write and design marketing materials.
- Poll non-experts. It is unlikely that your spouse, sister, or Bill in Sales are creative experts or members of the target market. But if you do ask others for their opinions and you hear a good idea, spare us the embarrassment and present it to us as your own.
- Keep sending us round after round of changes. Help us work efficiently. Do your best to consolidate feedback from all stakeholders and communicate it to us all at once.
3. Acknowledge our work.
Creative work may look like fun, but it can be emotionally exhausting and fraught with anxiety. As David Ogilvy said:
“The [creative] lives with fear. Will he have a big idea before Tuesday morning? Will the client buy it? Will it sell the product? I never sit down to write an advertisement without thinking, ‘This time I am going to fail.’”
Somehow, I don’t think Bob in Accounting feels quite the same about his TPS reports.
So please, be nice and let us know when we have done good work.
DO:
- Help your creatives celebrate their wins.
- Let creatives share in the credit for successful campaigns along with the sales team, the data people, and other stakeholders.
- Tell us when we have missed the mark. Constructive criticism helps us to learn, grow and improve for the future.
- If you are able, find something positive to say before you launch a critique.
- Choose your words with care. We creatives invest a lot of ourselves in the work and harsh criticism can be hurtful.
DON’T:
- Take your creative team for granted.
4. Respect the creative process.
Creating marketing communications is a complicated process that requires communication, collaboration, and respect for each other’s roles.
That said, creative professionals think and work differently than others. It’s how we are able to synthesize information, make connections, and find those big ideas.
DO:
- Minimize distractions. Creative strategy requires quiet time. Once your writers and designers have the creative brief, let us work in peace. But at the same time . . .
- Encourage collaboration. Some problems are better solved by a group of creatives who get energized by the exchange of ideas.
- Give us room to work. It is important for creatives to have our own dedicated spaces in which to meet, brainstorm, and blow off steam.
- Let us customize our workspaces. A creative department that looks like Accounting is not going to be a hotbed of inspiration. Expect us to plaster our workspaces with graphics and slogans and little articulating doodads. If graphic designers want to top their cubes with cardboard roofs to block out overhead light, let them.
- Allow us to get up and go after those big ideas. Most creatives don’t do their best work chained to a desk. Often, we find our best ideas outside the office—on a walk, in a park, or at the coffee shop.
DON’T:
- Put us on the spot. It doesn’t work to ambush a creative in the hall and say, “I need an idea!” Most creatives need time to research and ruminate before we can solve a problem.
- Hover. Like most people, creatives don’t do well with others breathing down their necks.
- Make every job a rush. If everything is a priority, then nothing is. Also, “ASAP” is not a due date.
5. Encourage our best work.
Most creatives love what they do. We put our hearts and souls into our work and we take great satisfaction in doing it well.
But our beautiful creative spirits can be broken. It can be difficult to care so passionately in an environment that discourages innovation, or worse, actively undermines our work.
DO:
- Be brave enough to take chances. You and your team will never achieve greatness by playing it safe.
- Stand up for good ideas. Sometimes clients balk at ideas that seem new or different. If you believe your creatives have hit on a good idea, stand up and sell it like you mean it.
DON’T:
- Step on our toes. When a proofreader or account manager is allowed to rewrite copy or dictate design changes, the work will suffer along with our morale.
- Always cave to the client. When a client requests a change that could hurt the performance of a piece, your creatives are right to push back. Clients come to us because they need our expertise, and they are paying good money to get it. The agency has a responsibility—to its creatives and its clients—to promote the team’s best solutions.
- Use time as an excuse. If your creatives constantly hear “there’s no time to do your best,” they’ll soon be giving their best to someone else.
6. Trust your creatives.
By the time you receive the first draft, your copywriter has already spent five, ten, twenty hours on research and writing. He may know more about the product, the client, and the industry than you do.
Similarly, your writers and graphic designers have invested a lot of time and effort in building their skills and knowledge. They know their crafts. Give them a good creative brief and let them do their jobs.
DO:
- Ask questions. If you disagree with something, ask about it. Give your creatives the opportunity to explain the thinking behind their work.
- Trust, but verify. Most things in marketing can be tested. Feel free to ask us if a headline, color, or other element has earned its place on the page. Encourage testing and optimization.
DON’T:
- Mark sweeping changes without talking with your creative.
- Assume you know better. You might be wrong.
7. Develop our skills.
In our digital world, tactics and technologies are changing every day, making ongoing professional development a must for creatives. If we aren’t keeping up, we are falling behind.
DO:
- Send us to creative conferences, marketing seminars, and industry events.
- Help us identify areas in which we can improve. For example, presentation skills. Some creatives are better at selling their ideas to clients than others.
- Allow us time internally to research the latest technologies and best practices.
DON’T:
- Use the excuse that there is no time or budget. The Internet exists, and it is full of free blogs and low-cost courses.
8. Feed our left hemispheres.
Too often, creatives lack an understanding of the business their work supports. Sometimes this is our fault. Other times, organizations don’t make much effort to keep us informed.
“Why would a graphic designer need to know that?” If you want us to do our best work for the organization, it really is our business to know.
DO:
- Educate your creatives. Share with us the latest happenings in the business, the market, etc. This will give us valuable context within which to create our work.
- Make us do our homework. Give us assignments for which we need to research competitors, their marketing materials, and their positions in the market.
- Share campaign strategies and results. Help us understand the thinking involved in targeting audiences and moving leads through the sales funnel. Review campaign results with us to help us understand what is working and what isn’t.
- Ask for our opinions—on a variety of work topics, not just our own work. Spark our curiosity, keep us sharp and engaged and on our toes.
DON’T:
- Leave us out of larger business discussions just because we’re creatives.
9. Make time for fun.
Like over-stressed engines, creative professionals can start to fail under the constant pressure to deliver great ideas on deadline. We need a break from time to time or we risk burning out. Ogilvy again:
“Where people aren’t having any fun, they seldom produce good work.”
DO:
- Organize creative retreats and outings to help us recalibrate and cool our creative engines.
- Dedicate time every so often for us to share our latest great work with colleagues inside and outside the creative department.
We’re all in this together
Creative professionals are a unique breed: friendly, fun, and full of amazing ideas. Take care of us, and we’ll take care of you by writing, designing, and producing beautiful, compelling communications to help grow the business.
We may be different than you, but we are all on the same team.
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