“We don’t want to hurt the creative team’s feelings, but…”
If you’ve ever received feedback that starts with a sentence like this, then chances are your ideas aren’t being audited properly.
Sure, some of us creatives ARE fragile artistic creatures who pour their hearts and souls into the work. Whether it’s internal or external, it can be easy to take critique personally at times, but why should feedback be considered a collision of opinions instead of being positioned as a constructive guide to keep the work on track? We might be tortured artists, but our clients and creative leaders are more than art critics.
Like art, advertising is of course perceived in many different ways. It’s subjective, it’s open for interpretation and it’s designed to make you feel something. The difference is, advertising should also be crafted to shift perceptions and behaviours, to solve problems and to drive action.
It’s hard (perhaps impossible) to remove your personal opinion, but having a criteria for ‘scoring’ ideas is a really effective way to validate why an idea does or doesn’t work for the brief… or at least to help identify what’s missing in order to make the feedback constructive.
And if you can’t quite agree on the score, you can always just throw Beyonce in the ad and hope for the best. Is there anything else that you’d add to the list?