Creative teams should master the broad principles of demand. I know, this is uncomfortable territory for most designers. Creatives don’t like to be put into a box, and they definitely don’t want to be told their ideas aren’t relevant. It’s just supposed to look awesome-right? Unfortunately no, ‘awesomeness’ is just a portion of the recipe.

These principles are important though, and learning to master the art of demand engagement will only increase the quality of work. After all, creative (design and copy) has an influence from awareness through initial response - and these are valuable touches that must be maximized at every opportunity.

While the goal of all creative teams should be to support the Brand to Demand concepts (see Become a ‘Bremando’ and Build Your ‘Bremando’ Army: Real-Time Creative Services), there are some obvious constraints to their ability to really focus on these principles.

The ‘UGG’ and the ‘Really?’

Generally, creative teams support entire organizations. They are often expected to do anything creative; from executive presentations to posters for a contest in finance. This can be a fun, but terribly limiting box in which to find yourself.
One of the biggest challenges-and opportunities-I’ve found is to break my team out of normal boundaries. There is so much green pasture to see, so much to influence, so very many ways to combine great creative, corporate and demand marketing programs together.
Opportunities for learning and growth of your Web teams:

• Become certified in Landing Page Optimization (LPO). Marketing Experiments offers certification programs.
• Master the use of multivariate and A/B testing tools, such as Omniture Test&Target. A must for optimizing creative content.
• Learn what results mean for your organization. Was it the message or imagery that led to those results?
• Test top messages (headlines, subtext and bullets) in a second round of tests with new creative (imagery, buttons of typographic treatments).

Still Uncomfortable?

Well get past it. The future of great Web design will include the principles of online marketing. The ‘box’ can be broken or reshaped however you’d like. Find comfort in the uncomfortable—green pastures lie ahead.

Having an in-house creative services team has been viewed as a luxury to mid-market companies, or a burden to the enterprise. “Our agency does that…” Right, and you pay for it in money and time. The traditional procedure is to hire an outside agency, or contractor (usually Web first, print second) to handle your creative projects for you. But this model presents a number of challenges.

A Real Need for Real-Time

An in-house team provides you with immediate access, flexibility and an ability to react and optimize in real-time. Even minor changes to a Web site like a banner, a page update or a new offer take several days; as you contact your agency, pay out the wazoo and then wait for them to make the change. Take that time and cost, multiply it over a year, and you’ll end up with a number that you won’t like. You probably would have paid for 2 or 3 in-house people that would have actually gotten the work done on time with less supervision.

Instead of viewing creative resources as a cost-center, there are a number of reasons to change your view to see it as a profit-center, with a potentially high return on investment-if running correctly.

So how do you align your in-house resources to support your direct marketing initiatives? There are a few key areas that will optimize your creative team to become a valuable resource in your marketing programs.

1. Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

• Headcount: Invest your headcount by supporting programs that have a tangible impact on your business. It is essential to have someone-in the marketing team-that is managing your Web site. Probably a couple actually.
• Budgets: There are a couple of ways to manage your money. Either to outsource everything to contractors and agencies, do it all in-house, or both. Print is much easier to outsource than Web, though banner production can be shipped out.

2. A Little Help for Your Friends

• Make sure your objectives are aligned with the objectives of the demand team. Objectives should be something like: supporting campaigns and programs, support brand and awareness and general services.
• Teach each member of your creative team demand principles. Guide their solutions to business and creative problems toward improving response either through copy, creative or a combination of the two.

3. Don’t Go Following the White Rabbit

• Focus efforts on demand creative. Prioritize demand-creation projects (offers, landing pages, banners, etc.) over projects that yield lesser tangible results (like t-shirts, or mudflaps for your boss’s truck).
• Avoid distractions. Its easy to get caught up on details, or pining over perfection, rather that getting solutions to market.

4. Nothing Wrong with Cookie Cutters

• Templates are your friends. Banner, headers, guides, whitepapers, product overviews, landing page mark-up and even some email can be outsourced. Original concepts should be home-grown, but all production should be outsourced to allow your designers to move on to the next project.

Hello all, I am taking the plunge and invading the blogosphere with my particular take on the influence that Brand Managers or Creative Directors can have on the success of a marketing organization. My team at Omniture is a hub for marketing and many other groups when it comes to executing programs.

As such, we are in a unique position to expand beyond traditional creative roles of just identity and design, and become a creative services organization enabling every facet of marketing.

Traditional Corporate Marketing, Demand Marketing and Product Marketing teams can easily become siloed—with the corporate team focusing on PR/AR, and the demand team focusing only on SEO and SEM and the product team focusing on sales tools and collateral. Creative Services generally work on almost all projects that go out the door in marketing, and are the last line of defense in making sure that each group is communicating the same concepts, visuals and messaging—in the same way.

Innovation and interactivity in marketing has become a necessity and Brand/Creative teams should be trailblazers in creating a synergy of brand to demand. Creative Directors can have a direct influence on demand when they focus their efforts on a few essential marketing programs to streamline the messaging from a corporate brand campaign to a demand campaign.

Two key areas where brand supports demand include:

• MarCom: Thought-leadership programs or campaigns
• Messaging-driven (brand), offer supported (demand): Product collateral, corporate advertising, white papers, co-sponsored industry guides

• Demand Generation: thought-leadership & solutions
• Offer driven (demand), messaging supported (demand): Webinars, best practice guides, industry findings and reports

A new brand to demand program structure would follow this model:

When viewed in this funnel model, it is apparent how many points of interaction that the Creative team will have on each program. This represents a huge opportunity for Creatives to move beyond being designers, and to becoming ‘Bremandos.’