We have teamed up with Motion to create a three-part series that examines the role Creative Strategist play in maximizing a brand's marketing capabilities. This is the first article of the three-part series.
The slowdown in global economic growth, sparked by tightening fiscal policies and high inflation, has forced many companies to reexamine their spending to stretch profit margins.
And ad budgets are usually the first to go.
Digital media is already feeling the heat. Platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook have reported declining ad sales over the last quarter of 2022.
Despite this negative outlook, paid social advertising remains a key driver of growth for businesses, with U.S. social media ad spend projected to reach $80.6 billion in 2022. That's over half of the total U.S. digital ad spend and nearly 20% of the total advertising expenditure in North America.
This presents an opportunity for businesses scrambling for efficiencies. Asking how does a brand maximize its marketing capabilities despite declining budgets?
The answer: A new role that ties data and creative together.
The creative strategy problem
As we move towards a privacy-first, less targeted marketing landscape, creative brains will become the biggest lever across paid social. The fastest-growing brands are supported by the best media buyers and good creative talent, a winning combination that makes for effective campaigns that drive growth.
However, the two teams are often siloed. Creative teams are left to make decisions without media buying insights. Media buyers also struggle with communicating creative needs back to the creative team.
The result: Two departments that aren't empowered to do their best work.
So how does one bridge the gap between creatives and media buyers?
Enter the Creative Strategist
The most digital-savvy brands have created a new role to solve this challenge: a Creative Strategist.
But what makes a creative strategist different from a CMO, creative director or growth strategist?
Indeed.com defines a Creative Strategist as "a marketing professional who focuses on improving a company's overall marketing and advertising plans." But that doesn't quite capture the breadth of the role.
The Creative Strategist is the bridge between the brand's left and right brains.
The creative team—the right brain—is focused on the creativity and innovations required to create an effective ad. On the other hand, the media team—the left brain—is focused on analytics, ad performance, and business goals.
Media buyers possess the data on ad performance and business goals. But they don't necessarily know how to create new iterations faster or provide visibility into insights.
Creative Strategists lead the people who will define the messaging and ultimately produce the ad—copywriters, illustrators, designers, editors. They also serve as the creative's connection to the left brain. A good Creative Strategist knows how to look at data, break it down into actionable insights, and translate that knowledge into new ads.
Simply put, Creative Strategists merge emotion and logic. They find the sweet spot between creative theory and media reality to maximize marketing results.
What a creative strategist does—and doesn't do
Carefully defining each department's roles empowers them to lean in into their strengths while minimizing weaknesses. Someone who tries to do everything will end up accomplishing nothing. The same is true for Creative Strategists.
Creative Strategists do not claim to be an expert in both worlds. Ideally, media and creative are kept disparate, but never separate. Instead, Creative Strategists facilitate collaboration and flow between the two poles. It's this careful partnership that allows businesses to fully harness business strategy and creative innovation.
Creative Strategists are not responsible for collecting and interpreting data. Media buyers highlight trends and problems, while the Creative Strategist helps share creative insights and puts the issue in a better context to create plans for future iterations.
Empowering your Creative Strategists
Today's top brands have used data-driven creatives to great effect, and a well-defined Creative Strategist is the most effective way to bridge the gap between media buyers and creatives.
There are many approaches when dealing with this new role, but it all comes down to whether your people team possess the right tools to deal with the challenges of the new media landscape. Just as art directors need copywriters, creative strategists need to be empowered to execute solutions.
Part 2
This is the second article in a three-part series. The first article, which deconstructs the Creative Strategist role, can be found here.
In 2022, the Creative Strategist emerged as one of the most critical roles in a marketing department. As regulators placed more limits on targeted advertising, organizations responded by pushing the creative to the forefront. And this is where the Creative Strategist comes in.
Creative talent has risen to become one of the most powerful levers in paid social, yet is often left out of the decision-making process. Creative Strategists act as the bridge between media buyers and creative teams, merging creativity and data to produce winning ads.
To better understand the creative strategy process, we need to look at the creative sprint.
The Creative Sprint
Logic and creativity may seem like polar opposites, but a good Creative Strategist knows that the two are closely connected. This idea forms the backbone of the creative sprint, a framework Creative Strategists use to solve problems quickly.
In a nutshell, the Creative Strategist takes a data-driven approach to test assumptions towards a desired goal. They look at previous results to identify problem areas and use that insight to develop and fine-tune creative solutions.
The creative sprint is broken down into four steps:
- Ideation
- Briefing
- Retrospectives
- Project management
Let's zoom in on each one.
Ideation
Starting is often the most difficult part of any process and the same is true for creative strategy.
The ideation stage is where the Creative Strategist unearths the assumptions and ideas that will form the basis of their campaign. But a campaign will only work if you know the issues you are solving, and sometimes the real challenge isn't seeing the solution but identifying the problem.
The ideation process typically involves two things:
- Analyzing data from existing ads. Many Creative Strategists start here as the insight will give them an idea of what creative themes are resonating with their target audiences.
- Studying what your competitors are doing. Competitive analysis helps inform you of ad trends in their campaigns, and whether they missed (or stopped using) something.
The Creative Strategist starts by mining the brand's ad account for inspiration and actionable insight. Where others might look at underperforming ads, the Creative Strategist would instead double down on what works. They would be thinking, "What ads are hitting their KPIs?" They might look at creative formats, messaging, ad types, product categories, landing pages, and influencer performance.
Why? Data takes the guesswork out of the process.
Briefing
Once the Creative Strategist has formed their assumptions, the next step in the creative sprint is to write the brief.
The brief is the blueprint for any marketing campaign. It contains the creative approach, instructions, and specific deliverables. The creative team will use this document to create new assets.
While there are different opinions on what a brief should contain, it should include the following:
- The hypothesis: The overall direction of the campaign. Using the assumptions formed in the ideation stage, the Creative Strategist lays out the goals that they want to hit.
- Specifics: The nuts and bolts of the campaign. What's the hook? What features do you want to highlight? It's important to communicate using plain, direct language. The simpler, the better.
- Outline: What will this round of creatives look like? This can include sketches, mood boards, written copy, or example ads.
A good creative brief is detailed and direct without being overly specific. Micromanagement can be counterproductive and lead to creative stagnation. The brief provides much-needed direction but the creative team will fill in the rest.
Retrospectives
Once the ad has been produced, approved, and launched, it's time to assess the campaign's performance. This step is also called the retrospective.
In this stage, the Creative Strategist looks back on what went right and what went wrong. Were their assumptions validated? Or do they need more ads to test their hypothesis?
The Creative Strategist will also have to make sense of the data shared by the media buyer and, if needed, identify the benchmarks the campaign needs to hit. The media buyer's definition of success may differ from the Creative Strategist's, and it's the Creative Strategist's job to put the numbers into context.
With the information gathered from this step, the Creative Strategist can then examine the best path forward. They may want to test the hypothesis further and produce more ads. Or they can use the insight to iterate more solutions. Either way, the creative sprint doesn’t end with retrospective and circles back to ideation.
Project management
Project management isn't one of the steps in the creative sprint, but it's an essential component nonetheless. Throughout the process, the Creative Strategist also acts as the project manager. They are tasked to empower the team to produce their best work while on a tight timeframe.
Creative Strategists often face three issues when it comes to project management work: creative block, team silos, and inadequate tools.
On occasion, the creative strategy has to help the team overcome a creative block. An overly restrictive brief can sometimes cause stagnation, so maintaining a relaxed stance can go a long way to get the team's juices flowing. It's your job to provide direction but you must allow the team to infuse their voice into their work and flex their creative muscle.
Next, team members become disenfranchised and creativity suffers when teams become siloed. You might have a well-oiled production house, but without that culture of collaboration, you will never make full use of your team’s creative talents. Invite your team members to see the big picture so they can be clear on what the ad needs to achieve.
Finally, Creative Strategists need to possess the right tools to deal with the creative sprint. Since they often wear many hats, they need to be empowered to produce creative work that hits the desired business objectives.
Part 3
This is the final article in a three-part series. The previous article, which focuses on the creative strategy process, can be found here.
Creative Strategists are experts at marrying data and creative concepts to produce compelling, converting ad content. As brands cut their marketing spend amid economic pressures, the Creative Strategist has become the linchpin for success in paid social.
An integral element of the Creative Strategist's success is competitive analysis.
Competitive analysis doesn't mean copying other brands' ads. Whenever a company launches a marketing campaign, the underlying elements (e.g. messaging, placement, format) are open to scrutiny by others. The Creative Strategist deconstructs the ad and uses the insight to find what works for a given audience.
Let's take a closer look at the Creative Strategist's unique approach to competitive analysis and how they leverage the data to produce high-performing creatives.
Competitive research for ideation
During the ideation stage, the Creative Strategist looks at data to form the set of assumptions that will determine the project's next steps.
But those assumptions are only as good as the data they're based on, and the Creative strategist must ensure they're asking the right questions. This side of ideation requires the Creative Strategist to follow be knowledgeable in all the major brands within the same sphere.
The problem: competitor data isn't public. The competitor could be repeating an ineffective ad, and the Creative Strategist would have no way of reviewing the performance.
If competitor data is sparse, an effective entry point for research is the Meta Ad Library. There, you can find ads running across Meta's different platforms—Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. The Creative Strategist could search for brands within the same niche and compare elements from their ads, like the CTA, messaging, and visual style.
Breaking down an ad into its base components allows the Creative Strategist to understand what resonates with a specific audience.
Taking a bird's-eye view
Sample sizes are a stumbling block to the creative process. It's often the case that the Creative Strategist only has access to in-house metrics or data from public databases, which could render their research less effective. That is why Creative Strategists who are lucky enough to work with multiple brands leverage the wealth of data available at their disposal.
Even if your data comes from different businesses that target different audiences, this "bird's-eye view" of multiple industries can be a valuable source of insight. The Creative Strategist can identify trends that work across different niches and use that data to spark ideation.
If you don't have access to a large database, create one. Proactive Creative Strategists will start their own ad library of competitor ads for to later reference during the ideation stage.
Speaking the buyer's language
Effective analysis also requires taking a closer look at your competitors' customers. Learning to speak the language of your shared audience allows you to approach ideation from an often ignored angle.
In many cases, the creative's assumptions are influenced by the marketing department. Brands always have an idea of what they want to look or sound like, and while they may adjust the creative based on external feedback, the process almost always takes a top-down approach.
A good Creative Strategist understands that current and potential customers are also a great source of insight and conducts research to understand how people talk about and use the product. They ask questions like:
- Who is the target audience?
- What are their pain points?
- Where will the ads appear?
- Where do users congregate?
- What placement will the ad use?
- Is the messaging aligned with the landing page?
- How much do users know about the product?
By taking a customer-first perspective, the creative strategist is empowered to produce creative versions that resonate better with the desired audience.
Experimentation through hypothesis
Competitive analysis is often a means to an end, but it can also be an avenue for experimentation. Using the baseline conclusions derived from data and analysis, the Creative Strategist develops a hypothesis to generate novel concepts.
The idea is simple: You create a hypothesis, test it, review the results, and iterate.
This approach starts with research. The Creative Strategist builds on the data they already have by seeking unconventional sources of insight. This could mean reading negative reviews on Amazon or reading conversations on Reddit communities. There, they look for angles that might not have come up in standard data analysis.
For instance, public comments and reviews can uncover new uses for the product or pain points for the creative team to test and exploit learn from.
Simplifying the workflow
Competitive analysis requires mountains of data to produce actionable insights, a labor-intensive process that doesn't guarantee results. Good Creative Strategists invest in tools that simplify their workflow so they can focus on what they do best.
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Motion is a creative analytics platform that helps Creative Strategists generate visual reports and test project hypotheses with minimal effort. It combines performance metrics with creative assets to make it easier to discover insights and share findings across teams.
Visit Motionapp.com to learn how to leverage their tooling to improve your campaign performance.