How should an engineer evaluate creative output?
A practical framework on giving creative briefs and judging creative output
Engineers’ problems
Tobias Lütke, CEO and founder of Shopify, has credited two books for enabling him to succeed in his role. Talking specifically about High Output Management, he said:
“…basically, at the end of the day, creating a business is an engineering exercise. That made the whole thing about becoming a CEO significantly less scary to me because I understand engineering.”
I can relate to this because as I transitioned from having a specific functional role in business analytics, at the start of my career, to more cross-functional roles (as more senior roles tend to become), I felt most under-confident in areas where there were no established handbooks that I could look up. Or, I should say, there were no handbooks which started from principles.
What is Good? What is Bad?
One function in which I have struggled the most is managing creative aspects of marketing, that is written form (aka content) and visual form (aka creatives). When people suddenly began to ask me to share a brief on a campaign, or when they began to share visual or written communication with me for getting an okay, I was often at loss.
What should I include in (and what should I exclude from) a creative brief? And, once the work is in, how do I evaluate it? Is it good? Should I ask for a change? If yes, which changes?
As self-absorbed as I am, I couldn’t often bring myself to say to someone, about their creative output, these soul-crushing and ambiguous words: Can you make it better?
One of the central themes of the book ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ is how do we define Quality: what makes something good? You can’t, the book says. There is no formula for good art: for good music, for good books, for good food.
But sidestepping the quality aspect, I eventually started using a framework that helped me manage written and visual aspects of marketing. I outline the framework below.
Forget good & bad. Let’s focus on what needs to be said.
The framework has 5 parts which feed into each other:
- Creatives are just a form of communication: This is obvious but in important to reflect upon and internalize. All forms of creative (an ad copy for a Facebook ad or a copy for the billboard; a static image or an animated video) are forms of communication. And the job of any communication is to transmit information.
- Give complete information: So if the job of communication is to transmit information, the job of the person giving creative brief is to ensure the completeness of information. A good framework is the journalistic 5W-1H framework. That is, if it’s about an offer, you need to cover as much information as possible: who are we (the brand); what is our offer; why should you (the customer) bother; when is it; where is it; how can you avail it.
- Medium dictates the message: The scope for creative interpretation comes in after the creative brief has been given: I. how do we capture attention, II. how should we communicate the message, III. how do we get the desired action. These parts are obvious to the creative team, this is where they excel, and, thus, it is best left to them. However, one thing, I learn over time which needs to be clarified is: medium dictates the message. What might be a good radio ad might make for a terrible TV ad. What might be a good essay might make for a terrible tweet-storm. So, the constraints (and possibilities) of the medium need to be communicated by the marketing team to the creative team in advance.
- Be consistent across all your communication: As an engineer with the disdain for anything not having quantifiable benefit, I always distrusted the term ‘brand guidelines’. But, now I have come around to seeing the maths behind it: if you pay Facebook a dollar, they might give you a reach of 1000, and a good creative might action from 20 out of them. But what about the rest 980 impressions? Is it all sunk cost? Not really. They too have entered your A-I-D-A funnel, and while most of them will never action on your proposition, some will keep sliding down the funnel after every interaction with your brand. Which won’t happen if the visual and written aspects of your communication (e.g. color schema, tone, keywords, logo, etc.) keep changing every time. To make past advertising dollars keep working for you, be consistent.
- Close the loop: While subjective assessment of quality of the communication can be avoided, eventually every communication has a job to do and its efficacy will be measured as some metric (click-rate, sign up rate, brand salience, etc.). It is important to close the feedback loop by letting the creative team know how the communication fared.
So, to summarize, what I have learnt to do while working with Creative team is:
While giving brief to creative team: Don't get overwhelmed; it’s just a form of communication. Give what is required from your side i.e. complete information of the communication. Emphasize on the medium that will be used to distribute it, its constraints and possibilities.
While judging the output: Check for completeness of info and any violation of medium’s principles. Check for consistency with past communication. Avoid subjective assessment if the first two criteria are being met.
Close the loop once performance results are in.
