Elevating Your Creative

With budgets being slashed and the rules of effective communication being broken, the challenges to raise the level of your communication efforts may seem daunting. They are not. Gain an insider's perspective into how great creative work that builds sales and the value of your brand is developed. This refreshed and revised workshop will provide you with the know-how you need to navigate through the complexities of developing a winning, integrated marketing campaign. Led by a seasoned agency creative director, you will be guided through the entire creative process, learning along the way the critical demands of various media, including traditional, non-traditional and digital.

There is an old saying "Marketers usually deserve the advertising they get." And it is so true. Breakthrough creative is a function of being a great client and having a great agency partner. Great clients create an environment that works to help accomplish their goals; bad clients find ways to damage the extremely sensitive and fragile creative process. This course will highlight how clients become great and how that relationship translates to great creative.

However being a good client is just the first step to great creative. Great advertising requires marketers to be focused, a willingness to take the right risks, as well as an inclination to identify and reduce the number of decision makers. But these actions are not sufficient.

A marketer must also be honest to have any hope of having great, breakthrough advertising: this course will help marketers face that reality. While advertising can improve a company's brand image, it is not a cure-all for every business problem. Participants will explore what advertising can definitely do and what it should not be expected to accomplish.

Who is This Course For?

Any manager responsible for advertising development or agency relationships and for those new to managing advertising, including brand managers, assistant brand managers and senior professionals wishing to refresh their skills.

Key Takeaways

• Understand the necessity for being single-minded and focused throughout the creative development process
• Know how to plan advertising campaigns
• Understand the necessity of providing the agency with relevant insights to help them produce outstanding creative work
• Provide feedback on creative ideas in a way the continues to motivate the agency and deliver the optimum creative solution
• Involve the agency in your processes.
• Learn to be candid and courageous able to concentrate on the big picture,
• Know what it means to reward excellence
• Realize why Clients are from Mars and Creatives are from Venus.

When

Where

ANA
708 Third Avenue
33rd Floor
New York, NY 10017

Instructor: Leslie Ehm

President & Chief Fire Starter, Combustion / Founder & Principal, Three Training

Leslie Ehm has been working and living in the world of creative collaboration for over 25 years. A former musician and TV host turned advertising Creative Director, she founded Three Training – a company devoted to elevating ideation, collaboration and presentation skills for ad agencies and marketers. In addition to Three, Leslie is also President and Chief Fire Starter at Combustion – a training and development company that sets organizational productivity on fire through applied creativity.

Leslie’s valued clients include DraftFCB, Leo Burnett, Disney, Pepsico, Diageo, JWT, Boston Scientific, AT&T, Nurun, Venables Bell and more.

In addition, Leslie delivers workshops across the USA for the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), is on the faculty of the Institute for Communications Agencies (ICA), is certified by the Creative Problem Solving Institute, a Guild Member of the Creative Education Foundation, a columnist for the Creativity Post, and a sought-after keynote speaker

Agenda

DAY 1

Introductions to session & instructor

Session Objectives

Understanding the Creative Mind

• What is creativity?
• Marketer’s role in the creative process
• The triune brain
• Empowering creative partners to success

Defining Advertising Objectives, Criteria and Success      

• Understanding what advertising can and can’t accomplish
• Developing a ‘single-minded objective’
• Applying strategy across campaigns – what will work where and for who?
• Developing credible criteria
• What will success look like and how will it be measured?

Demystifying Positioning Statements

• What is a positioning statement and what is it used for?
• Examples of good brand positioning
• The 4 elements
• The difference between a positioning statement and a brief

Developing a Great Creative Brief        

• Questions to ask and answer to inform any Brief
• Getting past the ‘template’
• Targets: From demographic to psychographic
• Going from insights to action
• Balancing information & inspiration
• How to write a Brief that makes the creative team say “I get it!”
• Interactive Exercise(s)

DAY 2

 Evaluating Creative

• How to assess creative work
• Marketer’s role in creative presentations
• Using the Brief
• Evaluation and assessment tools

 The Art of Feedback         

• What is effective feedback?
• How to deliver it
• Interactive Exercise(s)

  What’s The Big Idea                     

• What defines a Big Idea?
• Big Ideas vs Loud Ideas
• Recognizing campaignable ideas vs. one-offs
• Applying Communication strategy in idea selection
• Interactive Exercise

 Ideas in Action - Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC)     

• What and why of Integrated Marketing Communications
• Elements of a good IMC campaign
• Testing the theories
• Interactive Exercise (The Idea Satellite)