Commenting on creative work is like commenting on someone’s baby. You need to be ready for the baby’s parents to by insulted by what you think is constructive criticism. Procter & Gamble developed a structured way to provide comments that minimized that risk. The keys were linking all comments back to a pre-approved creative brief and funneling all comments through one spokesperson.
Creative Briefs
One of the cardinal rules at Procter & Gamble was that strategy should precede execution. When it came to creative work and especially advertising, everything pivoted off the creative or copy strategy and its core components of target audience, benefit, support and character.
When agencies came in with creative work for brand teams to review, the meeting would start by someone putting the agreed creative brief on the table. The brand team owned the strategy. The agency owned the creative. At its most disciplined, the brand teams’ only latitude was to review whether the creative was in line with the agreed brief.
The components of creative briefs varied. The best included these elements.
PROJECT or PROGRAM DESCRIPTION:
Opportunity, approach, output, timing, logistics, as well as guidelines regarding decision making; resources including people, budget and operational tools; accountabilities including milestones and timing; and consequences including how to leverage the win.
ENVIRONMENT – Where to play?
Context and insights drawn from the contextual data (So what?)
VALUES – What matters and why?
Mission (Why?) vision (What?) and values and how this project or program fits
ATTITUDE – How to win?
Overall organizational or commercial strategy including value proposition, positioning (target, frame of reference, benefit, support/attributes, character/attitude/voice,) posture.
RELATIONSHIPS – How to connect?
Mandatory elements to drive the connection with the target audience.
BEHAVIORS – What impact?
Desired response: AIDA (Aware – Interest – Decision – Action)
Creative Meeting
At the classic creative review meetings, the agency’s account people would introduce the creative work and almost inevitably say “We’re excited about this work and are confident that it completely delivers on the brief.” (At one meeting I knew the account leader had come straight from his vacation to the meeting. After he gave this opening, I asked him if he’d actually seen the work. He had not, but was still confident that it delivered on the brief. You can’t make this up.)
Then the agency’s creative team, often a copy writer and artist would present the work.
Then, the brand team would withdraw for a side meeting. At that side meeting, the most junior brand people would speak first, making one of three comments:
- The work delivers on the brief and should move forward as is.
- The work delivers on parts of the brief and can be modified to deliver on all parts.
- The work does not deliver on the brief and should not be pursued.
Note no one cared whether a 27-year-old associate brand manager liked or did not like a creative craft person’s work. All that mattered was whether it delivered on the brief.
Then the next most senior person would comment and the next until all had commented.
Then the brand team would decide what combined comments to deliver and rejoin the agency team at which a single brand team spokesperson – most often the brand manager – would deliver one set of comments.
On the early days of PrimeGenesis, we hired an artist to revamp the look and feel of our executive onboarding website. As we were reviewing the artist’s work, one of my more experienced partners who had been CEO of two different companies before joining PrimeGenesis said he didn’t like the new color scheme. I asked him where we specified anything about color in the creative brief (We had not) and suggested that we should trust the artist’s opinion on color more than his.
Implications for you
There are two ideas coming together here. 1) Agreeing on evaluation criteria in advance and 2) Providing creative workers one set of consistent comments in line with the agreed evaluation criteria.
The screaming benefit is to protect creative people’s emotions from strategic people’s logic. You need both. And strategy must precede execution, which is why the strategists review the creative people’s work and not the other way around. This structured approach helps the strategists comment in a way that inspires, enables and empowers the creative people.
