The creative landscape is swiftly evolving, necessitating a fusion of rapidity and ingenuity in business strategies without compromising on imaginative excellence.
Matthew Rayback, a renowned creative director at Adobe, stresses the shift in creative management within marketing circles, emphasizing the need for transformation not in creativity itself but how it is managed.
The demands of the current market are clear: speed and agility are paramount, yet they must not undermine quality.
The reason is the accelerated pace of transformation, as noted by Rex Salisbury of the venture firm a16z during the pandemic surge. He remarked on how businesses experienced a digital shift in mere months that would typically span years.
This rapid digital transformation creates an urgent need for marketing teams to expedite campaign development, thereby increasing the pressure on creative teams to produce required assets in a timely fashion. Leaders savvy to emerging trends in creative management are better equipped to keep up. Here are five trends that are pivotal for 2022.
1. Expansion of In-House Creative Teams
There has been a significant rise in the development of in-house creative teams over the past decade. According to a 2018 study by Forrester Research and IHAF, there has been a 22% increase in in-house creative teams in the last ten years. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, over half of the advertisers have migrated their creative departments in-house.
More recently, the in-house movement has shown no signs of slowing down, even amidst the pandemic. The IHAF study reveals that “80% of participants indicated an uptick in marketing tasks managed internally since the pandemic started, with 50% citing the last two years as a direct catalyst.”
Many businesses are content with the change and are looking to further integrate in-housing across various departments. Survey data from Axciom, a leading customer intelligence company, suggests nearly half of the respondents view in-housing as a key marketing focus, with 40% projecting it as a continued priority in future years.
2. Agencies Retained for Niche Expertise
Despite the trend towards in-housing, external agencies, consultants, and freelancers remain valuable, especially for their specialized expertise. Even major brands known for consolidating marketing and creative efforts internally, like Proctor & Gamble, still heavily utilise outside services.
In-house creative teams may handle the bulk of the work, but a significant portion (86%) still partners with external talent. The main reason for engaging agencies and freelancers, according to a survey in our 2021 Creative Management Report, is to access specialized skills (60%), followed by the need to supplement capacity (44%), strategy development (24%), and to expedite work (20%).
Alex Blum from Blum Consulting Partners, Inc. notes that in-house teams usually depend on external resources and highlights two main forms of agency partnership: firstly, for added creative capacity and secondly, to delegate specific tasks that play to an agency’s strengths.
3. Creative Process Undergoes Transformation
The creative industry is now defined by an unquenchable desire for new content, putting creative teams at the forefront. As demands for fresh, unique content rise, even with increased staffing, creative teams struggle to keep up with requests, and tight deadlines exacerbate this pressure.
Matthew Rayback draws an analogy between creatives and automobile factories, suggesting the traditional creative process is now outdated. Rather than producing one ‘car’ at a time, creatives are now tasked with manufacturing a fleet of customized vehicles simultaneously, necessitating an overhaul of the entire creative process to adapt to these new demands.
4. Creative Impact Guided by Quantitative Assessment
The conventional approach to measuring creative team performance often revolves around output-based metrics, such as project counts, review cycles, and completion rates. While valuable, such metrics don’t sufficiently emphasize the tasks that significantly impact business objectives.
One major challenge is that often, creative professionals aren’t privy to the actual outcomes their work generates within marketing campaigns. This gap needs closure.
Content demand is soaring, thus lowering the margin for error in resource allocation to non-performing projects. Marketing teams must establish a feedback mechanism to convey quantitative campaign results back to creatives, who then must leverage this data to prioritize tasks in alliance with marketing goals.
5. Imperative Rise of Creative Resource Management
Resource management, which involves strategic leadership and technological tools, is gaining recognition as the cornerstone for planning, executing, and evaluating creative operations encompassing personnel, processes, and budgets.
Traditionally reliant on spreadsheets for organization, the unpredictable nature of the current market has rendered such methods obsolete. In line with Forrester’s insights, effective resource management has grown from a static spreadsheet method to dynamic, real-time solutions, proving itself vital in navigating the tumult of the pandemic-inflected business landscape.
Concluding Observations
Echoing the words of the legendary Yogi Berra, who referenced a Danish adage, forecasting is a daunting task, particularly regarding the future. Still, the pandemic has fast-tracked trends already in motion, with these five serving as prime examples. Rather than simply monitoring these trends, it is imperative for creative and marketing leaders to proactively adapt and stay ahead.
