Like Wine & Cheese, Marketing and Creative are Better Together Part 3: The Role of Agile in the Creative Production Process
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 the role that Agile can, and should, play in the creative production process. Withers opened the topic by asking the panelists to weigh in with their thoughts and experiences using the Agile methodology in the creative production process.
Newall started by expressing some of the positive aspects of agile. Specifically, he talked about how agile is great for helping creative teams give clients more effective work at lower cost, both by speeding up the creative process and also by looping the client in sooner and more frequently: “Agile helps us get more ideas out faster, and we get less precious about ideas. It doesn’t work to spend 6 weeks working in secrecy and then present a fully formed, final product. That never works, and it doesn’t save you money”.
However, Newall was quick to point out areas where the agile process doesn’t work in the creative field. For example, the agile process is great for something like an email subject line, where ideas can be generated, discussed and iterated quickly and at low cost, but it doesn’t work as well for something like a TV spot. Generally, when the cost of fleshing out and idea to present to a client becomes costly, the agile method begins to fail. Newall reiterated that, for him, the benefit of using an agile process in the creative production process was to get clients to make decisions quickly, and to pull them into the process early and often.
Lewellan shared an in-house example of building review templates. On his team, they bring the client in early on decisions like copy and color schemes by providing them with very specific instructions about what needs reviewing. He also provided a specific caution for in-house creative teams working with legal or HR departments, that bringing in the compliance teams tends to slow the process down. Rather than bring them in early and often, wait until the marketing client is happy with the creative, and run the very final drafts by the compliance folks so that they don’t get bogged down.
Colangelo summed up the panel nicely by pointing out that the most important thing for creative leaders to remember is that some aspects of agile can be great for creative teams to speed up turnaround time on work, and to produce more effective content, but there are other aspects that don’t work well with the creative process. Rather than force your team to conform to the entire Agile process, pick and choose what elements of the process work best for your team, and use those.
Read part 1 of the panel, Resolving Friction & Misalignment Between Marketing & Creative.
Read part 2 of the panel, Blending Technology and the Human Touch.
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.