Marketing organizations are constantly challenged to keep all the pieces of their brand glued together. From traditional advertising, online, direct, and the next generation of social media, brands have never been at greater risk of becoming fragmented and diluted. This brief presenation is an high-level review of how to ensure your Creative Services Department is a good postion to support your brand.

1. Building a Creative
Services Organization to
Help Support Your Brand
By Jon Anderson, Creative Director
2/23/12
2012
Copyright
®
Jon
Anderson

2. Bringing it all together
Marketing organizations are constantly
challenged to keep all the pieces of their brand
glued together. From traditional advertising,
online, direct, and the next generation of social
media, brands have never been at greater risk
of becoming fragmented and diluted.
2 2012
Copyright
®
Jon
Anderson

3. Design your organization with clear intent
Like a well designed room where all the pieces fit together, a
great creative services organization compliments and supports
the rest of the marketing department and ultimately the brand.
In its ideal form, a creative services department should be built on the core
marketing needs of the company and be able to effectively support all internal
groups including: marketing, product teams, sales, etc... (In fact, the sales team
should LOVE the creative group.) All departments should have access to well
defined and streamlined processes to ensure business objectives are met and that
projects are produced on time. Creative teams should be happy in their work while
producing a quality creative product that builds upon the company brand. In
addition, teams should also be measuring performance for continued improvement.
3 2011
Copyright
®
Jon
Anderson

4. Supporting business objectives
By the time someone starts designing the spare bedroom they
may have forgotten about the architect’s big vision. The same
goes for marrying business and marketing objectives with
creative department goals. Creative departments need visibility
into high-level goals in order to take a more productive and
tactical approach.
In addition to specific marketing goals, it is critical to lay the
foundation upon at least 3 key principles:
1. Maintain the highest standard of work
2. Work with complete efficiency and accountability
3. Ensure fluid team communication
4 2011
Copyright
®
Jon
Anderson

5. Matching deliverables and talent
One of the most important first steps in having a successful
creative department is determining exactly what kind of
deliverables your creative team is responsible for and what
kind of skill-sets are required.
Right off the bat that seems like an easy question to answer, but it’s surprisingly
tricky to get right. Many teams are strong in design, but not at conceptual
thinking—or they are brilliant at producing collateral but don’t understand how
to optimize an email for lead generation. Creative talent comes in a wide range
of skill-sets. Knowing what the differences are and how to build your team
around your needs makes a huge difference in the long range success of a
department. After working through this process, you should get a pretty good
sense of what kind of team you need to build, train or outsource.
5 2011
Copyright
®
Jon
Anderson

6. Not all projects are created equal
Since projects vary in size and scope, and in order to get
realistic forecasts, it’s helpful to rank projects based on a sliding
scale. For example, a corporate event may take months to
produce using all of an Art Director’s time—whereas an email
and landing page may simply require dropping in copy. Projects
can be defined as follows:
Type 1: Large scale project - Over 100 hours
Staffing: Requires creative staff of 3 or more
Timeline: From project kickoff to completion takes a month or longer
Type 2: Medium project - 40 to 100 hours
Staffing: Requires creative staff of less than 3 or 50% of 2 staffers time
Timeline: From kickoff to completion takes less than 1 month
Type 3: Small creative or production project - 1 to 40 hours
Staffing: Requires a creative staff of 1–2
Timeline: Project could take anywhere from 2 hours to 1 week
6 2011
Copyright
®
Jon
Anderson

7. How to set performance objectives
A creative department’s culture should allow for defining success
on multiple levels. One key benchmark is determining the number
of projects that can be produced in a fiscal quarter.
Start by establishing a baseline for the number and type of
projects that were produced in the last 6 months. If this has not
been measured in the past, take your best guess and start
keeping track going forward. This measurement can be used to
set department goals, reorganize teams and validate budgets.
example
7 2011
Copyright
®
Jon
Anderson

8. Department organization
Departments come in all shapes and sizes. Good cataloguing
of project types makes it much easier to determine how to
retool a department or set up a fitness plan. It’s also key in
figuring out which mix of personnel is needed: ie: traditional,
direct, online, print production or fully integrated.
Understanding how to build a team to serve the company’s
brand maps directly back to understanding these data points.
8 2011
Copyright
®
Jon
Anderson

9. Creatives are okay with accountability
A typical marketing myth is that creative teams only want to
produce fun work for their portfolios and don’t care about
results. In fact, the opposite is true. Creative teams like to
measure their success. When a creative person knows the work
they produce yields tangible results and is meeting program
objectives, it’s quite gratifying.
When the creative goes wrong, it’s often because there is a lack
of clearly defined goals and objectives. The more focused the
objective, the better the creative result. The fuzzier the objective,
the worse the creative product and the more painful the process.
9 2011
Copyright
®
Jon
Anderson

10. Bad process inhibits good work
Marketing is a complicated business. Even the most experienced
marketing professionals struggle with basic processes and
systems, wasting enormous amounts of time and energy.
Of all the components at the start of a marketing project nothing
is more critical than the Creative Brief to get teams moving in
the same direction. At its best, the brief is a clear and focused
piece that guides projects from start to finish. It’s the one salient
document that all parties agree to, the information kiosk, the
project constitution, and the undisputed representative of the
brand positioning.
10 2011
Copyright
®
Jon
Anderson

11. The right tools should seem easy to use
Bringing all your marketing resources together means having a
tool or tools that allow for visibility and access to the brand.
This includes: identity materials, campaigns, messaging, and
strategy.
To date, few solutions have emerged that can meet everyones
needs. Third party solutions often fall short on perceived
capabilities leaving companies to build proprietary sites that
require a significant amount of resources to manage. When
evaluating project management solutions and brand
management tools, be sure to separate your mission critical
needs from the “nice-to-have” features. Most folks only use
the basic functionality to access the most common resources.
11 2011
Copyright
®
Jon
Anderson

12. Validating costs
Somewhere between trying to create great work and running
the department you need to validate costs. The creative
services department can provide an extraordinary amount of
value, both from a marketing and cost perspective. Being able
to communicate that value when budgets are being scrutinized
is important for maintaining harmony with the CFO.
When a creative department is staffed correctly, it can be a
huge money saver for the company in comparison to being
heavily dependent on a decent advertising agency.
12 2011
Copyright
®
Jon
Anderson

13. Summary
Building a creative services department is no easy
task, but with the right motivation and plan, even the
most complex organizations can hum along like a
well oiled machine.
Having a coordinated effort across all departments is
the only way for companies to be confident that their
brand can stay on track.
13 2011
Copyright
®
Jon
Anderson

14. Jon Anderson, BIO
Jon is tirelessly dedicated to improving processes
wherever he can. He has helped advertising agencies
revamp their systems, unified corporate marketing
departments, and built common sense process models
that have helped companies save on their bottom line.
Jon started his career in advertising in 1995 and has
worked at leading agencies and corporations. He has
helped build brands and revitalize product lines creating
award winning campaigns along the way.
14 2011
Copyright
®
Jon
Anderson