Welcome back to Marketoonist, the cartoon I’ve been hand-drawing to poke fun at marketing and business nearly every week since 2002. Was this email forwarded to you? Please subscribe here.

The Creative Review

Share on LinkedIn | Facebook

In 2006, I drew one of my most popular cartoons: “The 8 Types of Bad Creative Critics” (pasted below). It featured common archetypes like “The Blender”, “The Waffler” and “The Crammer.”

It seemed to strike a chord because many of us have been in bad creative reviews, on either side of the client/agency table. One agency even asked to print the cartoon as a giant mural in their conference room as a sort of cautionary tale to clients.

At the time, I worked on the client side, and had seen a lot of creative work go off the rails, often in how the creative reviews were managed (or not managed).

Creative work is only as good as the process used to develop it. And the creative review is one if the key stages that is often bungled by too many cooks in the kitchen and not having a clear and constructive way to evaluate ideas.

Matt Davies and Pieter-Paul von Weiler at BetterBriefs launched The BetterIdeas Project last week. It’s a fascinating research study with the IPA into this critical but often overlooked stage — how ideas are currently evaluated. I got to know Matt and Pieter-Paul when we collaborated a few years ago on cartoons related to getting better at writing briefs.

Matt and Pieter-Paul found that it typically takes a whopping 5 rounds of creative development to get to a signed-off idea (up from 3 rounds in 2007, as reported by the IPA). Only 10% of ideas are evaluated against clearly defined criteria. 70% of creative agencies don’t trust the creative judgement of the marketers they work with. The top words used to describe the process are “inconsistent,” slow,” subjective,” and “painful.”

At the same time, they found that creative agencies are proud of only 26% of work they’ve been involved with across their careers. The number for marketers is slightly higher, at 36%. 75% of agencies and 54% of marketers agree that “most creative work doesn’t stand out.”

That chasm leaves a lot of room for marketers and agencies to improve how creative is briefed and ideas are evaluated to do their best work. These are teachable skills, and ones that can help brand teams punch harder than their weight. Because the norm is so lackluster, marketers and agencies that buck the typical process can stand out.

One inspiring takeaway from The BetterIdeas Project: “Marketers who inspire their agency to do their best work are 3X more likely to feel proud of the work they’re involved in.”

New Cartoon Collaboration

This is the fifth of seven cartoons from a new collaboration with Confluence by Atlassian on how their product helps set knowledge free.

It’s hard to turn ideas into action when we don’t have a great record of the ideas we’ve come up with.

Cartoon From The Archives

And here’s the cartoon I mentioned that I drew in 2006 on Bad Creative Critics, way back when I used to call this cartoon “Brand Camp.”

Share on LinkedIn | Facebook

Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

P.S. If you like these marketoons, here are a few ways to help:

1. Bring me into your company to speak

2. License cartoons for presentations or more (if a picture tells a thousand words, a marketoon tells a thousand boring PowerPoint slides)

3. Forward this newsletter to a friend with an invitation to subscribe: marketoonist.com/newsletter.

4. Buy my latest book

5. Collaborate with me on cartoons for marketing, culture change, or thought leadership

6. Just hit reply and say hello

About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.