Five Steps To Effective Ad Creative

Step 3

In my capacity as a marketing and advertising consultant, I'm frequently put into the position of advocating creative changes that, to be blunt, serious design pros resist. I do this for one very simple reason. My loyalties are not to the finished piece in someone's portfolio. They are to the performance metrics that the piece will generate.

This doesn't have to be an either/or proposition, and it rarely is. But to a time-stressed and/or inflexible designer, it can sure seem that way, especially if the changes are coming from outside of their chain of command. Advocating for effectiveness can put you into a position of stepping on the toes of personnel that got the piece through a committee to approve, and challenging the wisdom of their professional judgment.

Do this without a degree of finesse or experience, and you can set yourself up to fail by by appearing out of your element. Force the changes through with pure stick and carrot (or the designer realizing that you only have those tools in your bag), and you work without their emotional buy in. The most you can hope for in that situation is inefficient and under-effective execution. The least will be sabotage, personal drama, and other side effects of failure.

So.. how do you side-step all of that?

Step 1 - Forget the why.

Why a designer is opposing change, especially if they are not on a comfort level to honestly communicate, is an endless rabbit hole that you do not want to explore. Maybe your designer is insecure about their position. Maybe they secretly wish they were back in art school. Maybe they are trying to win awards so they can get out of their current gig. Maybe they feel that you are trying to turn them into a hack. See what I mean? Endless maybes, and all of this is not getting your job done.

Avoid the temptation to psychoanalyze, and focus on the most effective uses of everyone's time and talent. You do that by...

Step 2 - Replacing emotion with data.

In direct marketing creative, this can be done through putting metrics to practices, and ideally, by showing analagous test results that support your changes. A ghost button may be very forward-thinking and spot-on for many consumer classes, and will look sharp in a portfolio... but if the audience doesn't skew to a younger and more affluent demo, it might just be the wrong message for the brand's price point. Serving the audience gets easier when it's not your taste, but your numbers.  

Step 3 - Use the NS10s.

A small aside: in a previous professional life, I fronted a rock and roll band. We made multiple albums, in studios that had some of the best sound equipment money could buy. But when you got down to final mix for what a consumer might hear in their sound system, you had to -- absolutely and without question -- run the work through consumer-level audio.

The speakers that every pro back then used were Yamaha NS-10S. They were the industry standard that every sound engineer utterly hated, because they were flat and dry and lost many a nuance and small point that you worked like mad to achieve. But they were an absolute godsend as a sanity check.

The same concept applies in design. Working up materials that look fantastic on full screens and oversized monitors, but don't work in a mobile-first environment, can easily sink your project's effectiveness. And just saying that the piece is responsive and will render to fit a screen doesn't mean you've done all you can. Knowing how your audience will see your materials should be the start, not the end, of the process.

Step 4 - Design to individual people, not demographics.

Everyone is prone, on some level, to the Naturalistic Fallacy. (That's a philosophical construct, best simplified this way: "What is true for me is true for all.") Even if the prospect is dramatically different from the team, creative pros will choose their pet fonts, colors and favorite tactics when possible, because no one thinks they have terrible taste, or starts a project with the goal of ugging it up for the dumbos.

But when you do a fairly simple exercise in naming your prospect, you get past uncharitable work for, say, 55-year-old homeowners that skew 80/20 male, and have disposable income for lawn equipment. Instead, you start making something for a guy with progressive lenses, financial worries from kids that are in college and retirement not too far off, who uses the Web to try to keep up with new music so he's got something to talk about with his kids. (See how we're sneaking in sympathy for the prospect? See how your designer is feeling better about moving away from that cutting-edge and hard to read font, and giving you an easy call to action, because the prospect has so much more o worry about in their life than finding the buy button?)

Step 5 - Be grateful.

If you are able to get a design pro to show real flexibility, don't take it for granted. That minimizes the contribution they've made to the process, and also keeps you from having a stronger relationship in the future. Instead, find ways to bring back some of the earlier prestige points if possible, and show that you are open to collaboration. A little listening can go a long way here.

Besides, if the ad can be both effective and a portfolio piece? Then everyone's happy. For a very long time, and maybe so happy that they'll find you other gigs later.

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