Creative Ops, not creative oops

It’s been a good few months since I made a career switch from brand management to creative operations. Same thing, only different… Or totally different, but kind of the same? 

Put simply, creative ops was the best term that described my scope as a creative generalist – leading the studio, but not art direction. Closer to a lead producer, connecting brand creative to the business value and outcomes. With a huge focus on implementing brand designs – a great brand design that is badly implemented – is a bad design.

Of course – like anything else – it’s a journey, one of the many steps on my career path.

I followed my intuition, a hunch to take all my experiences in branding, creativity & business – and bring all that to the market by switching from an inhouse role to the agency side. It’s been one of those moments when you realise you can be perfectly fulfilled in one place, but at the same time you could be sharing your expertise on a much broader scale – expanding impact beyond a single company. Welcome back, the agency world!

So what is this brand implementation fuss all about?

Well the truth is that there is a very good reason why good brand design work is rather expensive. And exceptional brand work will be exceptionally expensive. Yes, you guessed it – for an iconic brand creative, one should expect an equally iconic bill. Oh but this brand did it cheaply, or that brand did that inhouse or another one did that with AI… Yes, sure. Not questioning that. As a principle, great design is done by great teams of talented folks and this alone catapults the bill to the hundreds of thousands bucks league.

But here’s where the fun begins. Only fellow designers or some design aficionados would appreciate a remarkable brand design that stays as just a concept on paper or a beautifully crafted pitch deck. The real business wants real results. The design can only prove its value, if it has a chance to work in real life. The real business wants brand design that gets implemented.

And this is where creativity meets business, as I see it.

Look, I do appreciate aesthetics and beautifully crafted concepts. I hold an arts degree after all. Such creative imagery can play a major role in refreshing a brand’s picture or throwing some inspiration into an otherwise stale company. I’ve used that myself back in the days when I was art directing or designing. There’s a place for all that, no doubt. And it gets even more interesting with generative AI. No questions here.

But here’s the thing – you can have all the most inspiring imagery, the sharpest brand narrative and the most beautiful, heart-melting colour palette & typography. Yet, this only works if you are able to bring it to life through your team. It’s how all these assets work for your business, that really matters.

Creative oops is when you invest resources without a definitive plan for success.

It’s like having high hopes that the new creative will turn the business fate around, but missing all the groundwork and steps necessary for the change to last. Every marketer would agree with this: if you have a bad product, and a bad offer, no marketing effort can fix that. Not for a long term. And if you have a great creative design, it’s only as good as what’s being shown in public and rolled-out. Nobody cares how sophisticated your brand strategy is on paper, if it doesn’t shine through your brand actions. Your team needs to be able to use it. And this enablement is an integral part of the brand design process, if done right. Creative oops is when a good design gets badly implemented. 

Then Creative Ops is when sufficient work gets done to secure a successful execution.

It boils down to a solid change management practice – mastering both planning, and executive qualities. Launching feels great, but what happens next is what separates successful ventures from the lesser lucky ones. It’s the guidance, the systems, processes and assistance – all the enablement that an organisation and individuals need to be successful in the long term. And of course, a bad design that is exceptionally well implemented, remains a bad design – unfortunately.

I hope those days of really bad design will be gone soon, especially with the current AI revolution. We can test new ideas quickly for free or at minimal cost. We can build functional prototypes within hours, not months. This means we should expect even higher quality output – at least from the people who already know what they are doing. Pair this with the right tooling & processes to build an effective enablement program – and watch your ROI on the top percentile.

It’s what smart folks do to increase their luck – it’s called planning for success 🙂

/K.