For a lot of clients, this is second nature. But many clients put their effort into the approval process instead of providing good input up front. This episode goes into some detail about the elements of sound input and the questions you may want to ask and answer along the way.
Transcript:
Hey, there it’s Grant. So how do you get good work out of your design firm or ad agency or any creative firm? Well, it helps to start at the beginning. Welcome to clienting. So yes, everyone. Hello there. It’s your old pal grant Sanders. And today we are talking about input how to give good input. The.
About input that everyone needs to understand is that this is the greatest superpower a client can wield, right? It means the project gets off to the right start. There’s going to be less wheel spinning. If you give good input, it just means that your creative service firm is going to have everything they need to do the work they need to.
And that’s going to mean the project’s going to be less expensive for you if they charge by the hour. It means that the project’s going to be more effective because they are going to have the information they need to do the best job possible. So. Important things happen in the input session. And I can tell you this from hard one experience that clients that don’t necessarily do a good job in the input phase of a project end up.
You’re not going to believe me when I say this, but they end up going through many, many rounds. Of revisions later on in the project, because they didn’t clearly define what was going on, what the challenge was, what the message was, what the, what the data was, what the support points are. So do a good job upfront and do a good job upfront.
And we’re going to talk about how do you do. You know, how do you provide that ammunition that your creative service firm needs to do a great job. Okay. So, you know, it starts with a meeting, right? It starts with a kickoff and you, the first question to ask is. You know, who’s in that meeting? Well, it just depends on who you’re working with.
You know, if you’re working with a freelancer or two, obviously the freelancer or two need to be in that meeting, but sometimes you might be working with a design firm and maybe the project manager is in that meeting along with the designer, or if it’s an ad agency, maybe it’s just an account service person or some, you know, agencies have different policies or.
Processes that they use to do the work. And so, you know, you might have the creative team in there. You might have just the creative director in there. I’ve been in lots and lots of different situations where, you know, one abled able-bodied account executive has gone to the meeting and has to do all the work to take all the notes and translate everything into something that the creative team.
Use, I don’t necessarily think that’s the right way to go. I, I happen to believe. That the sooner you bring creative people into the process, like right at the beginning, right in the input session, then then they can start to get their brains moving in the right direction if you bring them in later.
And, you know, sometimes just for the cost costs of the project, you need to limit the number of people in each meeting. You know, because we know this from experience 5, 6, 7 people. And I mean, That’s, you know, that’s a couple thousand bucks right there. If the meeting is an hour. Right. So it just depends, but you know, but the thing to keep in mind is if you can squeeze the creative people into this meeting, that people who aren’t going to actually be doing the work, then that’s a good thing it’s going to help.
So let’s talk about the first bit of information that we need to nail down in a kickoff meeting like this. Okay. In an input session I’ve been in situations. Client has asked us to develop a new project, right? They, they knew what they wanted. Right. They wanted an ad. They wanted and a website. They wanted a social media campaign, but they had not clearly defined the problem.
What was the problem? The marketing problem that needs to be solved. Or at least addressed, and there are some situations where the client has defined the problem. But isn’t necessarily clear on what the tactic is that we’re going to use to, to address that problem. Right. They may know that they have a problem with the perception in the marketplace.
You know, maybe their customers think one thing and they want them to think about. But they’re not a hundred percent sure of the best way to solve that. That’s okay. You know, this is why we haven’t put sessions so we can get all these things out on the table. The third situation that happens more often than you may think, but it happens is that the client will come to the.
Without a project or a problem, you know, they just, you know, they just meet with their agency and say, okay, we have to move the needle. We have to sell some product. We have to get people to our website, but they have not defined a lot of the really important stuff that needs to be understood before creative team goes forward.
So we don’t know the tactic, we don’t know the problem. And then there are some situations, the best kinds of situations where the client has defined the. And define the tactic correctly and we just go forward and I have to say, you know, that does happen, but it’s, it’s rare that a client would have everything right at the beginning and that’s okay.
You know, that’s why we work together in teams. That’s why we put together programs like this. So just keep in mind that when you are executing a project attack, Like an ad or a website or a PR campaign or an event or anything that has to do w w you know, where creative people put their brains together and come up with a solution, a creative solution.
That’s easy for the. Creative service from to quote, right. That’s easy for them to find the price because they’ve done it before because they know what their resources need to be. You know, they can sort of count heads and say, okay, this is the number of people that we need to put against this project.
And this is what it’s going to cost. Right, but defining the problem. That’s not always easy to find the cost of something like that. Now as a client, if you’ve budgeted dollars for something like this, then the best thing you can do is say, okay, we have a maximum of X, let’s say it’s a maximum of $5,000 to go out and find to define this.
To survey in the marketplace to do some discovery, to, you know, there’s a number of different ways that, that we can go about defining the problem. But if you say I have a budget of $5,000, then, then that’s good because the agency can say, okay, for $5,000, we can do X, Y, and Z. And then we will. You know, maybe not the complete picture of what the challenge is marketing wise, but we will at least have more information than we had at the beginning.
And you know, some information to act upon is better than no information, right? So, you know, discovery can be expensive or although discovery can be inexpensive. You know I have done some good research, some good discovery for not a ton of money to find out what, where clients sits in the brains of their target audience.
I had one project for a recent nonprofit that we did some online surveys that we recruited through social media. And they were qualitative surveys, you know, maybe 150 responses, but they sort of bar blurred the line between qualitative and quantitative. And, but they get got us some real at the, at the heart of what this nonprofit needed to talk to talk about in their communication.
Because as, as is the case, sometimes the client had a very, very clear thought about how to market. This service? Well, it was actually more like a product service and they were incorrect. They thought that if we just told people about this product service, that people would buy it, but there was an emotional reason for them to do it.
So we did surveys. We uncovered that emotional reason. And then we did a whole campaign. That used that emotional trigger as a way to get people into purchasing this thing. Right. And it wasn’t expensive. It was, you know, some ads on Facebook for, I think we spent $150 and then. You know, in time, time can be expensive depending upon how big you are as a client, but it’s not as expensive as hiring a massive research firm to do a bunch of qualitative and quantitative research.
It’s not as expensive as just a booking, a focus group room. We, you know, back in the good old days, we used to do focus groups with one way mirrors where. Where we would sit behind in a dark room behind the mirror and watch people talk about the product and eat M and M’s and make ourselves sick and take a lot of notes.
Nowadays it’s, that kind of thing is more easily done for a lot less. Online and you can get more respondents. So you have sort of the safety in numbers with regard to your data. And also, you know, people are willing to take online surveys for a much smaller incentive. I recently did one where we got 250 plus responses and w it’s going to cost us 12 t-shirts to get all those responses and the results, the data that.
Is super, super good. So anyway research is good. So, you know, let’s talk a little bit more about research do, if you, if you don’t have research already done, if you haven’t defined the problem, that’s one thing, you know, get, if you can get out there and do some discovery with, or without your agency.
Great. You got to do that. But what if you do have research, what if it’s proprietary research that you paid a lot of money? If you’re working with a creative service firm, hand that over to them now, it’s it. There’s going to be a cost associated with this. You’ve already paid for the research, right?
You’ve probably, you know, if it’s a, if it’s a heavy duty research vehicle, it probably costs in the neighborhood of $10,000 or $20,000. It just depends on the size and scope of, you know, the, the scale of the. But you know, and this is proprietary research. You don’t want it to fall into the wrong hands, but in this case, you really need to hand it over to the ad agency so they can go through it.
Don’t just give them the executive summary, giving them the data so they can dig because there is a huge difference between a page and a PowerPoint document that has a number on it. And some information. Your agency might be able to find from the verbatims within the research from specific data that you may not have been looking at.
And you know, they’re going to charge you for that time to look into that data, but that’s money well spent because they’re looking for a hook. They’re looking for a, an interesting insight and insights are very, very hard. You know, if it, if an insight is easy to come by, it’s not really an insight. It’s just a, it’s just a truth.
You know, an insight is something that you know about your audience or your marketplace that you have dug for that is not just sitting there on the surface for anyone to find, right? Your competitors can’t find it, your competitors, haven’t done the, do their due diligence to discover that insight. Maybe they have another insight, but you need an insight about you.
Product your marketplace, your people, your audience, something that can give life to your creative product. And let’s talk a little short briefly about the difference between qualitative and quantitative research. You know, quantitative research is really valuable because it helps you understand the, the gross numbers of the situation.
Right. It helps you get your head around the vast universe of data. Right. And usually with quantitative research here, you’re serving thousands of people and there’s some safety in numbers and in that data, right, you can be assured that with the more responsive. You will have more confidence in your data, but I’m here to tell you the quantitative data as a creative person, as a person that, you know, sort of poles, headlines and ideas out of thin air qualitative research is practically.
Useless for a creative person. I mean, it may, it may help the account planner push something in it, in the right direction. But a creative person is not going to have a lot of use. Quantitative data. Right. But qualitative data on the other hand is something different. With qualitative data, we’re dealing with emotions with quantitative data, we’re dealing with information with, with proof points, emotions are much more potent, much more powerful for a creative person to work with.
Right. And just an example here. We have done. Several projects where we did qualitative data focus groups or interviews, or, you know, mall intercepts, where we talked to consumers. And one thing that one consumer said became an entire ad campaign or an entire One thing that one consumer said, because sometimes that’s all you need.
I can recall a one time we were working for the Connecticut department of transportation and there was a woman there who was talking about how she needed to. Take three buses and it took her close to an hour to get to work and an hour to get back. And with the new service that was being put in, she could get home and feed her kids in 20 minutes.
So that little insight that she laid on us became the, the basis for. An entire ad. That was great, you know great to hear it from a creative standpoint. Great to know that it’s true and that, and that we can rely on it came out of the mouth of a real consumer, that that kind of stuff is super, super bad.
Anyway, qualitative versus quantitative qualitative, just from a creative standpoint, tends to be something that we can use. Quantitative data is, you know, good for geeks. Good for nerds. Good for account people. Good for account planners, but the creative people don’t really have a lot of use for it. You know, if you are going to say.
65% of males aged 35 to 45 are content with their underarm deodorant that doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t really help me as a creative person. Okay. Back to the input session. You’re in a meeting with creative folks with account service people with, you know, whoever’s in that meeting and there are two questions that any good creative person or creative team are going to have.
Right. They’re going to ask what’s the goal of the engagement and what’s the main message, right. And you might think, okay. That’s the same thing, right? The main message is the goal. The goal is the main message. Well, they’re not the same thing. The goal, the goal might be something as simple as let’s get 5,000 more people to the website every day.
And the main message is not. We need 5,000 people to come to the website. You know if you, if you don’t know what the goal is, or you don’t know what the main messages that’s cool, you know, that’s why you have people in the room to talk about it. But when it comes to your main message, it really does help for you to have an inkling of what your main message should be.
You know, if I am developing a program for a client that may message become sort of the beacon that we use to, to find our path forward. Right? It’s not necessarily the headline. It’s not necessarily, it could be the tagline. If it’s. Written, but it’s, it becomes the thing that we sort of zero in on as a creative team.
The main message now you’re going to say, okay, so what, what, how do you discover a main message? And I’ve written a fancy little flow chart and I can send this to you if you send me. But he, you know, main messages are hard to come by because you arm your main message, your main creative thrust may be different than your competitors, even though you work in the same marketplace, maybe with similar products or maybe even the same products, the last part of the.
Process is the creative brief. Now some clients like to write their own creative briefs and, you know, I th I think that’s cool because it helps them get their head in the game. It helps them understand, you know, all the pieces that need to. Into this process, but sometimes it’s good for the agency.
Even if a client writes their own creative brief, it’s sometimes it’s good for the agency to write their own creative brief. Why? Because it helps you see that they heard what you were saying in the. When you were providing really solid input. And that’s a good thing. And also client, some agency, some design firms I’ve been in agencies that didn’t have creative briefs designed firms that never had a creative brief Some really live and die by their creative brief, and they really need to follow their process.
So allow them to follow their process. Even if you have a perfectly good creative brief in your hand, allow them to do what they need to do to get their heads in the right place, because you’re already there. They need to get there now. And also a creative brief is going to show you that they heard what you were saying.
So along the way, There are going to be a lot of questions. The best creative people, the best creative service firms designed for. PR firms, ad agencies, production houses, they ask a ton of questions. And like I said, at the beginning of this podcast, the best way for you to save money, to get good work is to answer those questions.
If they’re not asking a lot of questions, they’re probably not as good at. Work as you need them to be, you should get nervous when you give input to an agency. And there isn’t a single question coming back at you, you know, in that case, they’re just order takers. They just want your money to do the project.
And they don’t really want the answers to those questions because it might make their job harder if they have. Live with the answers anyway. So that’s it. That’s your input session? Not this long-winded discussion about input is what’s going to set you up for good work. It doesn’t guarantee good work, right.
You still have to have, there’s still a lot of parts and pieces that are moving. It’s still a bit of a moving, moving target, but it does guarantee that you are at least getting off on the right foot when you give good input agencies, creative people, account people, they love good input from clients and it really helps.
And now they can do the job they can do. And we’ll talk about the, the other parts of the process evaluating creative work. We’ll talk about that. Writing a creative brief. We’ll talk about that. Providing good feedback. We will definitely talk about that. Do’s and don’ts, you know, we’ll talk about that, but but this podcast is way too long already, so we’re just going to sign off.
Now, if you have a question, send me an email or write a comment on the website. We love, love, love comments. Thank you so much for listening to this whole deal. And this is grant Sanders until next time be well.