Andy Bargery, Client Director at Oystercatchers, explores how a ‘tough on the work and kind on the people’ approach can enhance your creative output without undermining the people behind it.
How do you evaluate creativity in a way that enhances agency performance?
At Oystercatchers, we work a lot with brands that want to get better results from their creative agencies. Often this means getting more impactful creative work – communication that moves the needle on brand building or sales uplift.
A key tool for encouraging agencies to do their best work is to think about how you evaluate their output, and then how you provide feedback that’s well-formed and productive. My colleague Neil Quick has a solid point of view on this, formed from his time as MD of Publicis in London, which is “you can be tough on the work, but kind on the people.”
I like this. I like this a lot. It recognises the importance of treating people well, which is the very foundation of how to nurture productive and long-term relationships between clients and agencies.
How are you tough on the work and kind on the people?
We regularly train brand side marketers on how to evaluate creative work and then how to respond productively. We call this approach feeding forward rather than feeding back.
By feeding forward, you first look for reasons to appreciate the work – what inspires me – before exploring how it can be further developed – what could be bigger and better?
In this way, you don’t highlight negatives, but instead explore the positive aspects of what’s been delivered and how these can be further developed. A more sensitive and kind approach perhaps. Tough on the work, kind on the people.
Creativity is rarely right or wrong, black or white; there are multiple shades of grey – and every other colour in the rainbow – and so judgement needs to be sensitive to different approaches and interpretations of the brief.
Escaping the tyranny of subjectivity
Feeding forward addresses how you deliver a positive response to creative work. But you also need to have a framework on which to base your comments. A criterion for assessing work that goes beyond the classic, “my partner doesn’t like blue,” or the “IT manager says it’s not funny.”
There are lots of ways to assess marketing communications, and a simple approach is to look at the Four Bs:
Brief: does the work match the ask in your creative brief?
Brand: is it on brand, clearly identifiable and memorable?
Big: is the idea and creative elevation of it big enough to drive consumer behaviour?
Bold: will your target audience notice it in the sea of other work?
Now that’s a very simple framework for assessing creative communications, and that’s okay. By keeping it simple, your marketing team should be more clearly able to articulate their feedback to creative agencies in a way that is tough on the work and kind on the people.
At Oystercatchers, we work closely with brand side marketers to train them on how to evaluate work. We have our own approach – like the Four Bs – but also work with our clients to define a proprietary assessment framework for their brands.
By teaching our clients to feed forward and assess work objectively, we give them the toolkit required to get the best work from their agencies. In this way, they build long-term partnerships with their agencies that support both client and agency goals. The classic win-win.
Get in touch with our team to find out more about Oystercatchers’ Creative Excellence training, including how to evaluate marketing communications and feed forward.