Professional organizations rely on Creatives (communications specialists, copywriters/editors, content strategists, art directors, digital specialists, and graphic designers) to help them craft compelling campaigns that resonate with their target audiences.
But a Creative’s contribution to your bottom line may be difficult to define, and even more arduous to quantify—leaving many analytical thinkers without hard evidence of their value.
Nevertheless, a strong creative team, in concert with strategic, analytical marketers, is the key to empowering your organization. Here’s why:
1. Big Personalities
The Art Department is made up of colorful people with interesting quarks, varied interests, and, usually, big personalities—after all, they are dedicating their professional lives to finding new, better ways to tell your brand story. That usually takes some out-of-the-box thinking.
While not always to everyone’s taste, big personalities add flavor to any organization. These sorts of people love to mentor others, share and improve creative ideas as a team, and encourage real, natural human interaction with their colleagues.
In stressful, deadline-driven departments, big personalities help combat employee fatigue, boost morale, and foster team building.
2. We Share Our Ideas
The creative process can be messy. Really, really messy.
Anyone who thinks it’s orderly, controlled, and executed perfectly by electronic project management systems is either inexperienced or straight lying. Why? Because truly powerful brand stories are born from the chaos.
Your message can’t be created in a silo because your audience is made up of a broad range of people. You need a range of opinions to craft a message that appeals to all.
Proper brand storytelling takes creativity, teamwork, and a lot of dialogue. The Creatives on your team will be the first ones to step up, throw an idea out, talk it over, ask questions, seek out answers, and keep hammering away and refining until it works.
And we’ll enjoy the creative banter that develops with our colleagues along the way.
3. Got a Problem? We’ll Find Creative Solution
It’s what we are good for. Don’t be afraid to ask us.
I’ve lost count of the times in my career an internal client has come to me in a tizzy because leadership has asked for something—a press release, a product brochure, a consumer response—and they don’t know how to execute it.
In their panic, they often make the same mistake. They don’t progress or develop the concept beyond their leader’s initial description. While there are leaders who do want exactly what they ask for, the majority entrust their report to do the work they don’t have time to do themselves—develop their hastily written email into a live, effective initiative.
So, what’s the solution? Encourage analytical thinkers to strategize with their creative counterparts before starting an assignment. Creatives are trained to tell stories—either through narrative, or images, or a combination of both—and can offer critical guidance to your marketers to ensure they are crafting the strongest message possible and have chosen the best communication vehicle available to disseminate it.
4. It’s Art to Us
There is a stereotype: The hot-tempered Creative who agonizes over every word, every design choice, who battles with you over every single change you request and constantly threatens to quit.
I wish that stereotype wasn’t based IRL but alas it is. In my 10+ years in the field, I’ve experienced it first-hand many times. Hell, I’m sure there are people in my past who would argue I am one of them.
While unprofessional behavior is never acceptable, it’s important to remember if you have one of these types on your team, there is a probably a reason they are this way: it’s art to them.
I’ve heard—from more than one boss—I need to care less about my work. That has always thrown me for a loop. I can’t bring myself to care less. I really can’t.
And I’ve had many people who worked for me that can’t either.
Unlike business, art is rooted in passion, human emotion, and personal resonance. While the differences between title-case subheads vs. sentence-case subheads don’t matter to you, it does to your Art Director (and it should!) for a couple of different reasons. The differing perspectives your Creatives bring to the table help to ensure you don’t make a knee-jerk decision that contradicts your brand persona.
5. We Speak a Different Language
I am a writer, copy editor, content strategist, and brand storyteller.
That means language is the most important tool I have in my professional toolbox. But the language I use with my writing team is much different from the language I use when I am communicating with leadership or marketers.
Why?
Because writing and design are skilled jobs. You must know how to ask for what you want and how to provide critical feedback to get it.
The best way to describe this is an analogy:
Think if you wanted to build an ultra-modern log cabin in the remote Alaskan woods. You wouldn’t start with the contractor (in this analogy, the writer) to build it.
You would start with the architect (copy editor/content strategist) and tell them everything you want. Then, you’d wait while they drew up the blueprints and reviewed them with the contractor. When the contractor has technical questions, the architect answers them with task-specific directions to resolve the issue. When the house is built, you thank the architect and move in.
Basically, Art Directors and Content Strategists speak the technical language of their skilled employees—making it so you don’t have to.
6. We Face Fear Everyday
Not long ago, after I had been asked to return to a niche-product company, I found myself in a meeting with the newly-hired, super-hip, early 40s-something CEO. He looked straight at me and said, “Here’s an impossible project: tell our brand difference story in two paragraphs. And name drop.”
That was a tall order, but alongside a team of amazingly-talented, über-driven Creatives, we made it happen.
I hope the point of this aside is self-evident, but just in case, let me put it to you straight:
The Creatives on your team aren’t afraid to face a challenge, and while we may feel fear, it won’t stop us. Impossible projects, like the one described above, challenge the boundaries of our creativity, push us to think deeper, broader, more strategically, and get us out of our comfort zones.
We thrive under pressure and this is exactly the sort of situation we shine in, so don’t be afraid to put your content strategist in front of your CEO and let them dance.
7. We Take Risks
Building on the story above is a bit more of the same principle; only this time it applies to the lengths we go to knock that “impossible project” out of the park.
From team wordsmithing meetings (where copywriters and copy editors go to explore the very basic “Points of Light” that make up the pillars of your brand story) to cut-and-paste workshops (where you take a pair of scissors, all the copy you’ve created but can’t quite figure out how to arrange, and find new ways to tell the same story) your team may challenge your expectations of how the creative process should work.And that’s okay. Have an open mind. Ask questions if you don’t see the creative principle behind the exercise.
Remember, the most successful advertising minds had to pitch some CRAZY ideas to their bosses and clients before they made it into our public consciousness. Just picture how they got there.
8. We Will Challenge Your Opinion
Passionate people care about the things we commit our lives to. And that passion for our work can seriously improve the quality and quantity of the content produced by your team.
Bearing in mind the Creative stereotype, it’s important to emphasize there is an achievable balance between when a Creative is challenging your opinion to improve your work, and when you have a full-fledged drama queen on your hands, and it’s time to cut ties.
For the most part, Creatives aren’t seeking conflict. Talented, project-driven Creatives are pushing you to mine for details, expand your point of view, and yes, sometimes challenge your opinion.
If your team is respectful and knows when enough-is-enough and it’s time to stop pushing, you should welcome the challenge.
9. We Don’t Give Up
We often get the short end of the stick because we didn’t go to business school.
Some of us are self-taught artists, others went to art school, while others learned on the job. Hell, a few of us even went to graduate school (thanks, mom). But we didn’t go to business school and that’s a big deal in a world populated by MBAs.
Yet, our career choice alone says something spectacular about us—it says we don’t give up.
In our world, rejection and criticism are every day (or even multiple-times-a-day) occurrences. Everything we’ve ever produced in our careers has been subject to another person’s personal taste and opinion. To survive it, you develop a thick skin.
In other words, we’re tough because we’re used to hearing “no, try again,” “I don’t like it,” “it isn’t right,” and my personal favorite, “how about we try it this way?” without losing our drive to make the client happy. With us, you can give honest, constructive feedback without impacting morale.
10. We Think Differently
Creatives didn’t go to college to talk about charts, graphs, revenue projections, and inventory shrinkage. I can’t speak for us all, but I spent 6 years in class after class, writing paper after paper, about the nuances and power of the English language.
Essentially, I went to college to understand how to mine key information about a writer’s audience from the content itself and extrapolate based on that information.
Nowadays, rather than excavating text to discover what it reveals about the audience, I apply the same strategy in reverse and build communications around the messaging points I know will resonate and galvanize our audience to action.
In other words, we see language and graphics differently than our business counterparts. It’s that difference that makes us invaluable members of your team.
The Resolution?
Creatives add a much-needed dash of flavor to a successful MarCom Department—and can help you in remarkable, if unquantifiable ways. Next time you’re unsure what they add to your team, remember, people who think differently can truly change the world.
Imagine what they can do for your organization.
Rhiannon Pickus 
One thought on “10 Ways “Creatives” Empower Organizations”