If last week’s cartoon was about dysfunctional creative briefs, this week’s cartoon is about dysfunctional creative reviews.
Many organizations take a “too many cooks” approach when assessing creative. Everyone has an opinion, and creative communication can be subjective. If you try to accommodate everyone, you’ll end up with the lowest common denominator.
I think that how we set the stage for a creative review is just as important a part of the creative process as the creative itself. The most talented creative team in the world will deliver mediocre work if you don’t carefully manage the review stage of the process.
When an ill-defined creative brief is combined with a large review team, the result is a mess of compromises.
Here’s a classic video from 2008 parodying if large corporations redesigned the stop sign. There may not be a lot of actors in the scenes, but this exactly pegs the dynamic of having too many creative reviewers in the kitchen.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to navigate the creative review process.
(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed cartoon print. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post by 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)
Ori Pomerantz says
Too many people are trying to puff themselves up by participating in decisions that shouldn’t involve them. Managers are particularly prone to this problem.
Martin Stewart says
This reminds me of the old SEOmoz design curve graphs from years ago:
http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/102
…actually quite useful to get people to back off from a website project.
The urge for people to “add value” has precisely the opposite effect.
bob says
In the best organizations creative reviews are used the way they use focus groups: to obtain input from a wide range of perspectives with each piece of input accepted or rejected by a decision-maker who sees things from a strategic perspective and is ultimately accountable for the outcome. Too often, unfortunately, they are an exercise in accommodating everyone or at least not offending anyone.