Freelance Brand and Creative Strategist / Strategic Planner and Fractional Strategy Director
The Strategist-Creative relationship can be make or break for a creative project. Without mutual respect and excellent baton passing, followed by constructive feedback and supportive client sell-in, the resulting work is never going to be as good. And the client will wonder why they paid for strategy when they can’t see it in the final … Continue reading What I wish I’d known…about working with Creatives
I'm delivering more creative brief writing training at the moment and I've gone international! I'm working with a global agency where the creatives aren't always in the same timezone as the planning and client services teams working with them. So good Baton-Passing becomes even more important. Baton Passing relates pretty well to the journey of … Continue reading why Good creative brief writing involves good baton passing
I’ve always been a less-is-more type when it comes to putting my thoughts on paper. In my first few years as a Planner in the early 2000's, I was fortunate that back then agency clients were generally happy with half a dozen slides of ‘show your thinking’ with a few cited insight sources. By the … Continue reading Keep it simple, Strategist
I’ve been thinking a lot about creative briefs recently – I deliver Creative Brief Writing training for agency account handlers and/or junior planners and I’m also currently prepping a brief writing workshop that I’ll be delivering to some undergraduate students soon. It turns out that I have pretty strong feelings about briefs and briefing: 1. … Continue reading I really care about Creative Briefs
I had an interesting discussion with a senior Creative about propositions the other day, re how ‘creative’ they should be. Since many clients prefer to sign off on a proposition before any creative work begins they have to be well written enough to engage and excite the client – but without going as far as … Continue reading how creative should propositions be?
I’m becoming increasingly interested in not so much what we think about other people/places/things – but how we see ourselves. pic by Paurian on flickr, CC applies My Dad’s friends (in their 60s and 70s) are constantly telling him (and me) that they can’t possibly be as old as the other people their age look. … Continue reading It’s all about how you see *yourself*
A work distraction to rival twitter landed on the doormat this morning. Stable Stereotypes is a collection of pen portraits of the equestrian eccentrics that populate the horsey world, collated from a regular feature in Horse & Hound. Normally, I imagine this wouldn’t be of much interest to the readers of a blog about Account … Continue reading stereotypes that really do have a place in the creative brief