Build Your ‘Bremando’ Army: Real-Time Creative Services

Digital Marketing · By On · 4 Comments

Hav­ing an in-house cre­ative ser­vices team has been viewed as a lux­ury to mid-market com­pa­nies, or a bur­den to the enter­prise. “Our agency does that…” Right, and you pay for it in money and time. The tra­di­tional pro­ce­dure is to hire an out­side agency, or con­trac­tor (usu­ally Web first, print sec­ond) to han­dle your cre­ative projects for you. But this model presents a num­ber of challenges.

A Real Need for Real-Time

An in-house team pro­vides you with imme­di­ate access, flex­i­bil­ity and an abil­ity to react and opti­mize in real-time. Even minor changes to a Web site like a ban­ner, a page update or a new offer take sev­eral days; as you con­tact your agency, pay out the wazoo and then wait for them to make the change. Take that time and cost, mul­ti­ply it over a year, and you’ll end up with a num­ber that you won’t like. You prob­a­bly would have paid for 2 or 3 in-house peo­ple that would have actu­ally got­ten the work done on time with less supervision.

Instead of view­ing cre­ative resources as a cost-center, there are a num­ber of rea­sons to change your view to see it as a profit-center, with a poten­tially high return on investment-if run­ning correctly.

So how do you align your in-house resources to sup­port your direct mar­ket­ing ini­tia­tives? There are a few key areas that will opti­mize your cre­ative team to become a valu­able resource in your mar­ket­ing programs.

1. Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

  • Head­count: Invest your head­count by sup­port­ing pro­grams that have a tan­gi­ble impact on your busi­ness. It is essen­tial to have someone-in the mar­ket­ing team-that is man­ag­ing your Web site. Prob­a­bly a cou­ple actually.
  • Bud­gets: There are a cou­ple of ways to man­age your money. Either to out­source every­thing to con­trac­tors and agen­cies, do it all in-house, or both. Print is much eas­ier to out­source than Web, though ban­ner pro­duc­tion can be shipped out.

2. A Lit­tle Help for Your Friends

  • Make sure your objec­tives are aligned with the objec­tives of the demand team. Objec­tives should be some­thing like: sup­port­ing cam­paigns and pro­grams, sup­port brand and aware­ness and gen­eral services.
  • Teach each mem­ber of your cre­ative team demand prin­ci­ples. Guide their solu­tions to busi­ness and cre­ative prob­lems toward improv­ing response either through copy, cre­ative or a com­bi­na­tion of the two.

3. Don’t Go Fol­low­ing the White Rabbit

  • Focus efforts on demand cre­ative. Pri­or­i­tize demand-creation projects (offers, land­ing pages, ban­ners, etc.) over projects that yield lesser tan­gi­ble results (like t-shirts, or mud­flaps for your boss’s truck).
  • Avoid dis­trac­tions. Its easy to get caught up on details, or pin­ing over per­fec­tion, rather that get­ting solu­tions to market.

4. Noth­ing Wrong with Cookie Cutters

  • Tem­plates are your friends. Ban­ner, head­ers, guides, whitepa­pers, prod­uct overviews, land­ing page mark-up and even some email can be out­sourced. Orig­i­nal con­cepts should be home-grown, but all pro­duc­tion should be out­sourced to allow your design­ers to move on to the next project.
  • http://www.evanlapointe.com Evan LaPointe

    Steve,

    Bold and inter­est­ing post for the Omni­ture blog. It’s nice to see the blog step­ping out of its box.

    Some­thing I’d be inter­ested in hear­ing your take on: the gen­eral plusses and minuses of the inter­nal vs. exter­nal approach, par­tic­u­larly as it per­tains to UX and design resources.

    Inter­nal resources have the ben­e­fit (although not fre­quently the habit) of work­ing hand-in-hand with the ana­lyt­ics team, ensur­ing that usability/design isn’t just guess­ing. On the other hand, out­sourced / agency teams have the ben­e­fit of avoid­ing cor­po­rate cul­ture and wor­ry­ing about whether defend­ing their designs will get them fired, which is not to be under-stressed.

    I feel like the upsides and down­sides of both approaches should be trans­par­ently con­sid­ered before tak­ing a firm posi­tion that hir­ing inter­nal resources to replace exter­nal is bet­ter or even ben­e­fi­cial, or the other way around. We shouldn’t for­get that the biggest cre­ative con­tra­cep­tive in the world is cor­po­rate politics.

    Omni­ture is lucky to have found one or two or five good cre­atives in Orem, but not every busi­ness is so for­tu­nate. If your busi­ness isn’t in SF, NYC, ATL, CHI, SJC, LA, or another pop­u­lated, cre­ative place, you can be hir­ing cre­ative tal­ent from an extremely small pool.

    Thanks for the new topic on the blog and I look for­ward to many more posts like this in the future!

  • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/sgustavson Steve Gus­tavson

    Hi Evan, thanks for the com­ment. Glad to see this blog is relevant.

    Here at Omni­ture we’ve built a very col­lab­o­ra­tive cre­ative team. In many businesses/agencies I sus­pect cre­atives still take the ‘ivory tower’ approach where their ideas are gold, and no one can say otherwise—that isn’t how we oper­ate. I take some pride in our unique orga­ni­za­tion, where instead of run­ning the team like an agency, we run it like every mem­ber is a ‘Brand to Demand’ mar­ket­ing man­ager, with a focus on either art direc­tion, copy or Web/email. There is a place for agen­cies when it comes to big pic­ture brand posi­tion­ing, con­cept­ing a major launch, etc. But you can’t move at the speed we do with­out a great in-sourced team who is inti­mately famil­iar with online mar­ket­ing principles.

    Every­one on my team spends a sig­nif­i­cant amount of their time work­ing side-by-side with our demand gen­er­a­tion team to care­fully craft our cam­paigns, and test and opti­mize them in as real-time as possible.

    I am also a major pro­po­nent of in-sourcing—in fact I am bet­ting my career here on it. I’ve never worked at an agency myself, but in my 4 years at Omni­ture I’ve man­aged a hand­ful of agen­cies, and though some pro­duce fan­tas­tic cre­ative they move at glacial speeds. My inter­nal team pro­duces every­thing that you see for Omni­ture these days, with very min­i­mal out­side pro­duc­tion resources—and we do every­thing from the offers you see in our ad place­ments, to the cor­po­rate Web site, to video, to events, and the cor­po­rate col­lat­eral system.

    We also have a great cul­ture within Omni­ture, where the Art Direc­tor on my team is able to push the bound­aries on cre­ative ideas with­out fear of reper­cus­sions. He is more of an extro­vert, whereas I am more of a clas­si­cal typographer—its is a per­fect ying/yang bal­ance where we are able to explore new ideas for con­vey­ing tough con­cepts. Sure some things get left on the cutting-room floor, but we don’t dis­cour­age brain­storm­ing new directions.

    As far as hir­ing good tal­ent is concerned—Utah is seem­ingly a small pool, but we know a dozen top-notch peo­ple we’d bring on if we could. But be will­ing to pay top online marketer-level salaries to hire the best!

  • http://www.evanlapointe.com Evan LaPointe

    Steve,

    I am so glad to hear that there are com­pa­nies out there with the dex­ter­ity you enjoy. Unfor­tu­nately, my own expe­ri­ence couldn’t con­trast more. While I agree with you that agen­cies can move at a glacial pace, I’ve seen that most busi­nesses move at a tec­tonic pace (the gaunt­let has been thrown — you are hereby chal­lenged to find a slower pace than both glacial and tec­tonic), par­tic­u­larly when it comes to cre­ative and web design, which is where it couldn’t be more inap­pro­pri­ate. The beauty of the web is that you have unlim­ited white-out, so why prod­uct devel­op­ment can take months is a mys­tery to me.

    I would be fas­ci­nated to hear what the responses would be if you were to ask your base of Test & Tar­get clients whether product/page/widget/visual design hap­pens faster for them inter­nally or with their agency. While it’s my prayer that the masses would lean your way, I fear that the inter­nal pol­i­tics that plague most large busi­nesses may push the vote the oppo­site direc­tion. This would be espe­cially rel­e­vant to tie back to Test & Tar­get where rapid devel­op­ment and deploy­ment adds to the qual­ity of your tests and allows for more refine­ment. It might also illu­mi­nate a hand­ful of great agen­cies who can be quick and don’t take gold bricks as payment.

    While I would totally agree with you in an ideal world, I’ve just found that:

    a) There seem­ingly just isn’t enough tal­ent to go around. If there’s any doubt about that, look at middle-budget web designs or flip your tele­vi­sion on and watch some ads for local busi­nesses. Final Cut Pro only costs $1,300. There are no excuses for this plethora of abysmal pro­duc­tion qual­ity other than a lack of avail­able talent.

    b) Too many peo­ple have opin­ions in large com­pa­nies, they are reg­u­larly lousy ideas, and some­how these peo­ple are in a posi­tion of authority.

    c) I’ve always agreed with what you’re say­ing here, but rarely have I seen it happen.

    So maybe it would be help­ful to share the Omni­ture for­mula and a few tips for F500’s to consider?

  • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/sgustavson Steve Gus­tavson

    Evan,

    A large part of the dex­ter­ity comes from 4+ years of build­ing trust within our orga­ni­za­tion through a thought­ful and sys­tem­atic approach to align­ing cre­ative with busi­ness objec­tives and chal­lenges. Though I do greatly ben­e­fit from a pro­gres­sive man­age­ment team that realizes—and is pioneering—the online mar­ket­ing world. In essence we are writ­ing the book on how to do online marketing—since that is what we sell! I feel your pain though, and I can only imag­ine how much red tape is found in many large organizations.

    I’ll con­tact the man­ager of Omni­ture Dig­i­tal, a out-sourcing team within our Con­sult­ing divi­sion that does cre­ative design, test­ing and imple­men­ta­tion for Omni­ture clients (in essence, an agency within Omni­ture that deals with noth­ing but these issues). He may have some good data points on this issue.

    As far as the tal­ent issue—where are you located? I agree most design/creative in mar­ket­ing is hor­rid, but I will attribute that more to a lack of under­stand­ing on part of the clients, and less about the avail­able capa­bil­i­ties. If a busi­ness isn’t will­ing to invest ($$$) in the right resources, they’ll get sub­par results.

    This is a per­fect illus­tra­tion of cur­rent issues, and the very rea­son I decided to write a blog about this theme. In future post­ings, I will go deeper into ‘cre­ative met­rics’ that will help brand mar­keters embrace met­rics, and how that data can over­power even the most pow­er­ful per­son­al­i­ties in the organization.

    My goal is to help mar­keters real­ize the need for in-sourcing, and how to attract, retain and reward top-notch cre­atives. Please con­tinue to fol­low my post­ings if they are help­ful, and I appre­ci­ate the dia­log and thought­ful ques­tions. My goal is the same as yours—to move our busi­nesses and agen­cies away from mov­ing at a pangeaic pace? ;)