Member-only story
From Hideous to Head-Turning: The Checklist That’s Guaranteed to Improve Your Marketing Creative Time After Time
“Argh, this is all wrong!”, I cried out in horror. Weeks since I’d briefed the agency. Weeks of anticipation. And they had delivered this. Page after page, it was way off. Hard even to know where to start. How could I get it to the level it needed to be?
When first inspecting a piece of creative, you’re usually left either deliriously happy, immensely disappointed, or — perhaps worst of all — totally ambivalent.
Emotional responses of this kind are natural (that’s what artwork is supposed to do) but they bring with them pitfalls. Pitfalls which can lead to you missing important amendments within your feedback, potentially costing you money, time and another small slice of your sanity.
I’ve long been on the lookout for a sequenced, reliable and repeatable system for reviewing creative work. One that could help me to methodically work my way through feedback and ensure that I have all bases covered when debriefing the creative partner I’m working with.
I recently read “Burn Your Portfolio” by Michael Janda, a literary salad of hard-learned principles for how to run a successful creative agency.
