Making Creatives match Media

Lately I have been thinking about “How to Make Creative Great Again”  to steal a phrase that has made its way into our lexicon in various ways. This doesn’t mean that all creative is bad but most creative has become cookie cutter and seen as an impediment to a user doing their primary task. 

To understand why this happened I think you need to take a deeper look into a couple areas of creative in the digital world. First, the mechanics behind its development, second the role of creative in each channel and last is cost impediments. I am sure there are many more factors but these primary processes influence the majority value lost.

Creative Development Process

In short, for large enterprise clients, creative is developed by a creative agency and media is deployed by a media agency. The creative agency rarely talks with the media agency for its developments and that causes a breakdown between the two major elements of campaigns.

Role of Creative in each Channel

Beyond making copy, images and logos, each digital channel has a very reason for being. For example, people go to Facebook for news, catch up with friends, while Snapchat has a much more personal connection feel to it. Keeping this in mind I thought I might make the below graph to illustrate better how creative can be built with channel in mind.

• Not a comprehensive list but wanted to get something down to keep refining

Creative Cost Impediments

The last big problem is cost. Oftentimes, the high production cost to implement different creatives for different mindsets holds back the implementation of true mindset based format creative. When this happens you usually end up with repurposed creatives that are not meant for the consumer to fully appreciate.

These three issues continue to misalign brands with reaching the full potential of creative in the digital world and unlocking the most value. I would recommend building out campaigns, to think through them thoroughly and look to build creative that fits the channel so you can cut down on inefficiency in spend and improve the user experience for your consumer. Ultimately this will build long term trust and value for the brand.

I’d love to hear your thoughts as I build this out more.