Why The Most Important Criteria For Creative Evaluation Is “On-Brief”
The most important thing we do as advertising agencies is develop new creative. It’s a long process with many potential pitfalls and one of the most precarious moments in that development process is when we the agency first share our work with our clients. In order to help clients evaluate our work — and to try to have some semblance of objectivity in what is an inherently subjective process— we propose evaluation criteria. There is no set-in-stone list of evaluation criteria but they generally mirror what we want the creative work to do in the real world. Clarity, uniqueness, stopping power, and motivation are some of the more common criteria.
One criteria that is often left off the list is Strategic Alignment, or “On-Brief” — essentially, does the work align to the strategy and brief that we’ve agreed to for the campaign. The primary reason I’ve heard for leaving On-Brief off the list of evaluation criteria is that it’s so important that we would never bring anything to the clients that wasn’t on strategy. More specifically, that delivering work that is on strategy is our job and if we allow clients the opportunity to say that something is off-brief, then they would be able to say we didn’t do what we promised.
I disagree with this line of thinking.
Firstly, if something is truly off-brief, clients will bring it up whether or not it’s listed on the evaluation criteria. If we’ve truly delivered something wholly different than what we promised, we won’t be saved by evaluation criteria that doesn’t mention Strategic Alignment.
On a more philosophical level though, the reasons given for not including Strategic Alignment in evaluation criteria are the exact reasons we should be including it. I accept that we would never intentionally bring creative work to a client that was off strategy, but we would also never intentionally bring anything to a client that was unclear, not unique, lacked stopping power, or wasn’t motivating. We’re asking clients to evaluate how well we’ve done all of these things, so if On-Brief is so important that it’s worth stating we would never deviate from it, then not only should it be included in the evaluation criteria, but it should be the most important criteria.
Furthermore, we as the advertising agency specialize in doing creative work. We regularly do work that is clear and unique and motivating and has stopping power. We are much more the experts on what work meets those criteria than our clients are. The one thing we don’t do all the time is execute creative work off of the unique strategy we’ve developed specifically for the client’s brand. So if anything, On-Brief should be the only criteria clients should have the authority to judge us on.
The argument against including On-Brief in creative evaluation criteria is essentially, CYA — we want to protect ourselves and the creative and we don’t want to give clients the opportunity to say that the agency did something wrong. I get it. But we all know going into a creative project that doing creative work (i.e. trying to develop work that is completely new and unique) is hard and subjective and that sometimes even the best agencies miss the mark. Nothing we do can minimize that risk. So let’s do our best work, take risks, put it all on the line, and show our clients that we aren’t afraid to be judged on our work.