Calling All Rare Talents

Posted on by Chief Marketer Staff

To all of you multi-disciplined creatives who still can’t decide what you want to be when you grow up or can’t describe your occupation in that little box on your tax return – the industry is about to beat a path to your door.

Marketers have come to realize a brand’s image is affected with every customer interaction. Just think how many opportunities exist for a customer to touch the brand. Today a customer experiences a brand through point-of-purchase, the teleservices channel, the Web, infomercials, e-mail, interactive kiosks, sponsored events, in-store merchandising, premiums, FSIs, and promotions. The list keeps growing.

Brand building in the new world order of integrated communications demands a flexibility and diversity of talent that exceeds the traditional advertising agency art director/copywriter team. The general advertising agency is no longer the sole proprietor of brand equity.

Those creatives who understand and embrace that the customer experience is only as strong as the weakest link in the continuum will be the champions of the future.

All the image advertising in the world will not overcome one bad experience on an ill-conceived Web site or having to deal with a poorly trained telephone service rep.

The creative power belongs to those with a total vision of how far a campaign can go and who understand that the challenge is to solve a problem, not just design a promotion. The industry will insist upon business-building solutions that work seamlessly across all media. Creatives must learn to think like architects, not just carpenters.

Scraps no more From which discipline will this total creative professional most likely evolve? From general advertising? Not likely. Creatives in the general world tend to view all other marketing activities as petty annoyances or scraps to be thrown to juniors. Remember, it was the world of general advertising that created the distinction of above the line and below the line and guess who wound up on the bottom. Perhaps the integrated creative professional will hail from the world of direct marketing. Not likely. True, direct marketing requires a certain degree of multi-disciplined expertise, but the medium itself is confining. Direct does not easily lend itself to total brand-building. New media shows a great deal of promise, but time will be the judge whether it becomes a true driver or simply another important component of the marketing mix.

Ah, yes, then there’s the promotion creative. A rare hybrid of designer, art director, writer, conceptor, toy inventor, merchandiser, direct marketer, idea generator – is my bias showing? Creatives in promotion focus on engaging the customer and forcing them to take immediate action. They actually instigate a change in behavior. To achieve this difficult objective, any and every medium has always been fair game.

Clients are demanding integration. They are tired of petty sandbox fights between various expert agencies about who gets the shovel and who gets the pail. The more inspired clients – and their ranks are growing – want total solutions that use the appropriate tools in the right proportions, without bias, to build their brands and achieve their business objectives. They want a singular big idea that is brilliantly executed across any and all channels. They are waiting for someone to step up and take the lead.

So stop thinking of yourself as a designer or a copywriter and learn to take on a strategic, consultative role of directing all communications. You don’t need to be a Shockwave wizard but you should be aware of what the software can do. You ought to be conversant enough with broadcast to be able to express a concept or an idea to the client or ad agency. The most wonderful thing about creativity is that it is usually transportable. You just don’t know its potential until you try to apply it to another discipline.

You need to be able to demonstrate to clients that you have the vision and can act like a leader, not a vendor. You need to take every opportunity to make an idea bigger, to stretch, expand, study, learn, dream, and explore.

The marketing communications pioneers are arriving at our doorstep. If we are not ready to welcome them in, they are going to go somewhere else to find what they need. And there will be many purveyors, both above and below the line, who will be willing to accept the challenge. The door of opportunity is wide-open. Be bold enough to step through it.

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