Recharging Your Creative Batteries: Article

Great article on getting past some of the little blocks that infect us all from time to time:

http://www.commarts.com/ca/colcreate/marP_287.html

Enjoy!

Design in the Age of Accountability: Article

Great article on the growing client imperative for measurable business performance from design investments!!

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!

http://www.commarts.com/ca/colbus/davM_291.html

What I do for a living: Creative Business

I am a communicator - Marketer, Creative Director, Art Director, Designer, Photographer

In what context?

I am a business to business creative professional who happens to be able to design for print and web and a commercial photographer.

What does that mean?

My strength is in developing strategic creative concepts that solve specific business problems. With a developed concept, I am able to turn the concept into reality either by assembling and leading a team of creatives or accomplishing tactical execution myself as a designer, programmer, photographer and artist.

My strength as a strategist comes from a talent for understanding business strategy at a very high level. There are many aspects of any particular business that I am not familiar with. I am not a scientist, or a technology guru or a plant manager and I don’t need to be. I am not hired to understand why part A fits into part 543 to make widget 35DS. That's your job. My role is to understand your business's strategic goals and identity, understand to whom and how they need to communicate to achieve those goals and to leverage all aspects of the situation to craft an overarching strategy. (That said, I really do get a kick out of understanding why part A fits into part 543 to make widget 35DS.)

My strength as a creative tactician flows from my understanding of creative strategy. With a strategy in place, a tactical plan can be generated (and quantifiably justified) that supports the strategy. The right media and methodology can be chosen and the best team for the job assembled. It just so happens that I am also a designer and photographer and am able to accomplish many tactical executions myself if my work best fits the strategic goals.

My strength (for a client) in creative leadership lies in an inherent ability to listen, understand, and translate business needs into creative strategy, turning that strategy into effective creative tactics, and providing a creative team with framework and leadership to execute those tactics. My understanding and experience with all facets of the creative cycle allows me to guide my team with a delicate mix of process and aesthetic. Solid solutions that incorporate sound creative are always the goal and if they incorporate an artful presence then everyone is happy.

My strength in creative leadership for the people on my team is defined by my desire to be a mentor and to lead by example. Unlike the majority of younger creatives, I am not in the business to create fine art. I am in the business to solve business needs. This is an appealing approach to businesses who want results, not berets. While alarming at first to many young designers, they quickly learn the benefits of working with these tenets guiding their efforts. My style of leadership tends to groom talented art directors who see design as a method of achieving their goals, not as the goal itself.


What am I not good at?

I am not a 'cutting-edge' or 'bleeding-edge' graphic designer. Some of the work that I do might fall into that category but it is not intentional. I am not going to appear on the cover of Graphis magazine. I am good at graphic design but being the next big thing is not something that I am interested in. I use the medium as a means to communicate. I do not design for design’s sake alone.

I am not good at being a ‘good ‘ole boy.’ I despise nepotism in any form. I understand the reality of it and I understand that you are much more likely to hire your friend than you are to hire me. I like working for friends but I don’t get nearly the satisfaction of “a job well done” from a friend that I get from “a job well done” for a client who hired me based on the merit of my work. That’s not to say that we won’t become friends...

“I’ll be over at the soup kitchen getting dinner”.

Royalty Free Stock Photography: Marketing

OK here it is - the inevitable gripe about royalty-free stock photography and its ubiquity in the business today. I know, I know, I am also a photographer and undoubtedly biased on the subject. Maybe that is true to an extent but this entry is purely from an art director's perspective.

The Set-up
I have a big client who has opted to go the route of stock photography CD's over hiring a photographer to get custom shots. We tried to talk them out of this option but the fact that this stuff is out there and that its existence is common knowlege makes custom photography a hard sell these days. We have been forced to use these images in all of their work and adjust the design work (and to some extent mold the concepts) to fit the available photography.

Yeah, I know...this happens to us all at some point, but a call today with a member of the team got me to thinking what the cost difference would have actually been had they been open to custom photography. Ultimately we spent upwards of $12,000 to try to acquire a library of images they could use in their materials. Most of that money was spent buying image CD's as opposed to 'one-off' purchases but for the cost of two images in high res, you have your CD and we are able to use at least two images per CD. One of the biggest issues that we face at this point is the fact that the client now see's a library of hundreds of image for which they have PAID. The vast majority of those images are not usable (from a design and concept perspective) for one reason or the other.

The Pitch
There are a plethora of resources providing marketers and designers with a wide variety of stock photographs. These services offer photographs which, on the surface, appear to be a tremendous value to advertisers who are trying to promote companies with a small budget. The usage is royalty free which allows marketers to spend a one time fee and reuse the image as many times as they wish for as many materials as they want to produce. For certain projects, using this type of stock material makes perfect economic sense, but there are several down sides to stock photography that are not as apparent:

Quality
There are a TON of stock photographs available but as any Art Director who has spent hours searching for the perfect photograph can attest, the number of high quality images are few in comparison.

Specificity
Stock photographs are intended to appeal to mass audiences. They are intended to be generic enough to apply to a wide range of marketers by fitting the business needs of the marketer just enough to be applicable. Commissioned photography provides marketers with images that are specific to their business needs and, quite likely, are a much higher quality than those available from a stock source.

Control
The business model for selling stock photography is based on the volume of licenses sold. Within any category of business, there are a limited number of photos in the pool to choose from and marketers are forced to draw from that pool. This increases the probability that competitors from within the same space will purchase the same images to use in their marketing efforts, hence confusing the targeted audience for whom their materials are intended. Currently, marketers have to present at least 13 impressions to a potential customer before their brand has any value and the dollars spent to generate those impressions can be severely compromised by confusion from any source. The average cost for a trade publication full page ad is around $14,000 per insertion order. These dollars are a risky expenditure if the resultant ad causes brand confusion due to the inclusion of an overused stock photograph.

Cost
The average cost per photo from a stock house that has the appropriate resolution for a full page ad is $450. A commissioned photographer can produce 20-40 usable images in a day of shooting at the cost of approximately $3000-$4000. This reduces the cost per image substantially, eliminates the issue of control, allows marketers to hire a photographer based on the quality of the work they seek, and provides an end product tailored to meet the specific needs of the client.

Conclusion
There is certainly a place for royalty-free stock photography and I would be a fool to say that there isn't. Your average 'smiling kid at the dentist' shot on the inside of a brochure for a local denist isn't going to hurt anyone. Take that same shot and put it on the cover of a brochure for a national manufacturer of dental equipment, you run the risk of the other big three manufacturers of dental equipment doing the same thing. And it happens all the time.

No Bueno...

Spotlight on Perception: Marketing

I am currently working on a site to feature my own personal design separately from my work with Form Creative. Despite just feeling a little better when I have a current and fully developed portfolio ready to go, I am going to be targeting businesses that are frightened off by the perceived cost of hiring an agency. It is a bit of a strange phenomenon, actually, and one that stuck in my mind as a great example how creative alone can be such a powerful force in marketing in any medium.

When we started Form Creative, our goal was to create a different kind of agency. A virtual agency that had embraced 21st century technology and leveraged it to bring together some really smart people at strategic thinking and tactical execution while skipping the big agency fees. This was in 2001 and at that time, that idea was not such a cliche'. We laid out our strategy and developed our materials, including our web site, to fulfill our strategy. In short order, we had grabbed some big business, at least in the context of our little agency.

Not terribly long after that, the virtual model really caught on industry-wide and we found ourselves competing with a slew of other very talented people and our new business opportunities began to diminish. We retained the lion's share of clients that we had acquired but it was becoming harder and harder to win new business. There are multiple reasons for this (as any entrepreneur will tell you) but one of the consistent messages we heard was:

"We can't afford to go with a big firm on this. We just don't have the dough..."

At first we were all a little taken aback. What were these people talking about? Did they not read our materials? We are practically the champions of little guy! Bringing agency quality thinking and execution without the huge agency fees!!

Then we started to poll people. We started asking prospects their impressions of our materials. For the prospects that had passed us over in favor of another firm, the overwhelming and consistent response was:

"Oh we didn't even go through your Web site. We all sat around my computer and hit your home page and realized we couldn't afford you"

Certain people in our organization were elated at this, of course, as it's a huge compliment to those who created the site. But we as the groups leadership, realized that we had missed our mark and that our own talents had outstripped our strategy. We had deployed the best graphic design we could to showcase our abilities in an attempt to illustrate that we were indeed as good as the larger agencies and in doing so, positioned the perception of our little slice of the web squarely in the big agency space. And we did it all with the creative - both the design and the copy. Won a few awards for it too, but had to redo it. The design was too slick. The copy overladen with industry catch phrases that made perfect sense to us, but scared off our prospective clients.

The Lesson for Creatives
Think hard about target audience and what message is being broadcast and how that message needs to be perceived. Apply the correct creative solution to the strategy. Favor 'problem solving' over 'award winning' and both may occur.

Could I design and develop a site that is fully Flash enabled with all of the slick animations and visually dynamic interface elements? Sure. But what problem does that solve? What is the perception that such a site would impart on the consumers of my material? It would certainly help me catch the eye of the designers and art directors that I am competing against but is it going to leave the targeted audience with the same impression? In 95% of the cases it is going to alienate them and distract them from why they sought me out in the first place - to solve their business problem.

The Lesson for Marketers
Great design is not measured by aesthetic value alone. It is measured by its ability to communicate a message using tactics that appeal to an aesthetic. When hiring a creative professional, be it a freelancer or mega agency, evaluate their commitment to purpose first, only then their tactical execution skills. Insist that they take the time to understand and work to fulfill your strategy. Don't let them go off on creative tangents that do not solve your business problem or worse, leave your prospects with an erroneous perception of your business. Work perception into your strategy and stick to the strategic focus that you know is right for your business.

The Business Of Being Creative: Creative Business

Interesting read by Elizabeth Bohorquez, RN, SRN, CPH.

The Business of Being Creative

I found it when it dawned on me that the title of my blog might be ripping off someone's book title. Turns out it almost is. I hope they don't mind...

The Language of Creative: Creative Business

In speaking to clients and prospects and hearing more often of the decision making process ultimately degrading into cost analysis alone, I can't help thinking about the term productivity and how it relates to the services that we, as professional creatives, offer our clients. Modern conventional business thought seems to define 'productivity' in quantitative terms alone without consideration for qualitative factors. We are in a qualitative business and emphasis placed on a bottom-line based on quantitative factors presents a monumental challenge for creatives trying to make a living. How we define ourselves to ourselves and to the people we work with/for is key to our success. Defining ourselves in terms to which they can relate is good communication at its core.

A Term They Understand

One of the definitions of productivity from dictionary.com states that productivity is...

"The efficiency with which output is produced by a given set of inputs."

Creative work without a purpose (the inputs) has a tendency to devolve into so much narcissistic self expression that it fails to meet the needs of its commissioner and hence, by the definition above, fails to be productive. The same applies any creative work be it illustration, photography or design. So what does productivity mean in the context of being a professional creative? What sort of adjustments can we make as a group to influence our employers and clients away from the denigration of the hiring and commissioning process solely based on the quantitative elements of our work?

Cliche's Aren't Enough

"Owning a Samurai sword does not make you a Samurai"

This has to be one of the best quotes I have ever heard for describing why a client should hire a professional creative instead of letting Mabel in accounting go at it with her library of clip art. It is also an age old argument and practically a cliche' for all of us competing in the commercial arts biz. And while it is a compelling and simple one liner, it doesn't really serve to ease the concerns of a client about to shell out the GDP of a small country for a new ad. No the real question is not whether you have the skillset to blow Mabel's clip art alligator ad out of the water. The real question is whether or not the cost of that ad is worth the expenditure - is it a productive use of the client's budget?

No matter what the end usage, we provide a service. Our work is intellectually based, highly subjective in some cases and somewhat ethereal when compared to payroll expenses and the capital expense of the super-mega-giga-plexing-machine-inator. There is a direct conflict between how the bean counters and CEO's associate our level of productivity to that of the number of widgets they can pop out in a day.

To connect the dots, take a look at what it is we offer. Not the end result rather what makes what we do productive and worth spending the GDP of a small country to acquire. What we are really selling is not the logo, the ad or the brochure. What we are selling is the thinking that creates the logo, the ad or the brochure. Our process, our talents, our experience and the application of all of these to solve a problem for our clients and employers (please no flames about me implying that the the execution is meaningless. The execution is the constant and therefore assumed).

Being a productive creative means deploying the processes neccessary to put our talents and experience to work to solve the client's problem. Research, brainstorming, sketches, brain-dump copy docs, interviews and sometimes navel contemplation all go into the service we offer. They all play an important role in developing the logo that makes our work the magic bullet that Mabel's is not. That is what makes us productive and how we can define our productivity to our clients .

We may not like to think of what we do using terms like productivity and process. We may not like to see ourselves as line items on a corporate spreadsheet but ultimately, to the people who write the checks, that is what we are. Embracing these terms and redfining ourselves in these terms to ourselves and to the rest of the business world will go along way to ensuring our line on the spreadsheet. Who knows, it might also land that big account.