Dec 4th 09 Posted by Fritz McDonald in Featured Articles, Strategic Creative

Why I Believe in Strategic Creative: I

“If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.” –David Olgilvy

I’ve been focusing a lot of attention on social media in this space—and will be doing so again, soon. Today, however, I’d like to pull back to the wide-angle view and talk about why we call this space I blog in “Strategic Creative.” At first, the words don’t seem to go together. “Strategic” is left-brain, analytical, quantifiable, numbers-based, logical, cool reason devoid of emotion. “Creative” is that thing we all want to be, free spirited, innovative, different thinking, art producing, rich in emotion and colorful experience. So why put them together?

In the field we play in at Stamats—the marketing higher education field—everything we do has a purpose. For us, marketing is about communication and reaction. Communication starts with thought (strategy that leads to expression, and creativity which sparks reaction). In today’s hyperactive marketplace, it’s not enough to have an edgy design and cool tagline. Great creative is not an end, but a means to an end. If it doesn’t move your most important audiences to some kind of action—greater awareness, response, conversation, relationship—it hasn’t done its job.

Flashy Nothings

Creative without strategy serves no purpose, even though it sometimes catches attention. It’s usually the wrong kind of attention, a splashy one-off that shines for a minute and then fades. This kind of creative work has no shelf life—anyone remember Outpost.com’s flying Gerbils ads? Outpost.com?—and it defeats the purpose of integrated marketing which is to build a strong, unified, and lasting image in the marketplace. According to David Butler, vice president of global design for Coke, “creative wins at the point of sale.” To do so, it has to catch the attention of your most important audiences and do something useful with it. And with the growing dominance of digital marketing, social media, experience, environment, and event marketing, capturing audience attention is that much harder.

It’s Not Mechanical

In today’s complicated marketing environment, you have to interweave tactics with radically different ways of working and outcomes. The best creative work—the kind that rises above the noise—resonates with your target audiences in all of them. It doesn’t matter how it resonates, whether through carefully sparked conversations on your Facebook page or a perfect type-driven design solution—what matters is that it strikes a chord. To know which chord to strike, you have to know something about your audiences…which brings us back to strategy. What do your key audiences think about you? What’s most important to them? In many ways, an effective strategy is built on listening…which is another way of saying that nothing provides a better foundation for creative strategy than research. The creative executions that rise out of research communicate what you’ve heard.

The Power of Strategic Creative

Creative has a big job these days. Every touch point—billboard, ad, tweet, microsite, open house, radio spot—has to build value and reinforce your brand experience. A Web site that does not communicate the right messages in the right way to the right audiences in the right places will not help you attract better students. A Facebook page that does not transform those messages into social content will also fail. Remember, integration is about continuity, not sameness. It’s about what your audiences see and how they see it.

Creative thinking is often intuitive; a way of mining emotion. Strategic creative marries logical persuasion with imaginative thinking because it has to—we’re not in the business of making art for art’s sake (and you’d be surprised how many artists plan their work). At the same time, too much strategy kills creative. Strategic creative balances the practical with the artistic and communicates a vision that influences perception. The strategy behind the creative work is a structure that provides direction and imposes order that allows it to flourish.

That’s just a fancy way of saying that—like everything else in marketing—your creative has to be intentional…on purpose, not random.

How does a strategic creative approach work? I’ll continue this…and get back to Facebook and YouTube. In the meantime, since so many of you are responsible for creative work on your campuses—from graphic designers to Webmasters—what kinds of creative strategies are you using? Are they working?

Photo by Visualogist