Like Wine & Cheese, marketing and Creative are Better Together Part 1: Resolving Friction & Misalignment Between Marketing and Creative
On February 27th, at the High Five 2018 conference in Raleigh, NC, inMotionNow presented a panel of creative industry leaders to share their insights on how Marketing and Creative teams can work better together. The panel was moderated by Alex Withers, CMO of inMotionNow, and included Robin Colangelo, VP on the Board of InSource, John Newall, President of McKinney, and John Lewellan, Director of Marketing Operations at Lexis Nexis.
During the panel, Colangelo, Newall, and Lewellan discussed how Marketing and Creative teams can reduce friction from misalignment. Withers kicked off the panel by asking the panelists to describe what sorts of frictions they deal with in their creative workflows, and how they handle them.
Lewellan began by describing how his team’s process had to transform as the team grew. When his team was smaller, they received a lot of ad-hoc requests “in the hallway”. That system quickly fell apart as the team grew and needed a better way to organize and track requests in a formal way.
Colangelo described the frictions she sees most often as originating from issues of speed. Marketers are pressured to turn work around so quickly, that they often forget to get Creative all the information they need in the brief. This creates frustration within the Creative team, because they aren’t having the conversations they need or getting all the information they need to complete a job.
Newall, however, took a different tack. He pointed out that not all friction is bad. As he pointed out, friction creates sparks, which can be productive when channeled appropriately. He emphasized that the “bad” friction can be reduced or eliminated when marketing and creative teams are aligned around four key questions:
- What is the problem we are trying to solve?
- Who is our target market, and what are they like?
- What is the brand voice?
- What does success look like?
Newall stressed that this is crucial information for Creative teams to have when starting a new project. They need to understand the problem, and they need to understand the benchmarks that their marketing clients will use to measure success, how the creative work will be judged. However, Newall cautioned that clients shouldn’t bog down Creative with the problem. He stressed that the Creative team is there to bring a unique perspective to the problem, but if you mire them in the challenges, they will never be able to come out of it with a great idea.
During the panel Newall, Colangelo, and Lewellan went on to discuss how Creative and Marketing teams can strike a balance between using technology and human connection to communicate, and the role of Agile processes in the Creative industry. Read part 2 of the panel here.
If you would like to learn more about how creative workflow software can help your Marketing and Creative teams become better aligned, check out a live demo of inMotion.