The Making - Episode 6

You can have the sharpest strategy in the room and still put out beautifully executed irrelevance.

In Episode 6 of The Making, Abeiku takes on Part Seven of Rules for the Marketing Communications Executive by Prof. Robert Ebo Hinson & Joel Nettey: Creative Development and Content Systems, covering the creative brief, creative evaluation, content strategy, and public relations.

If you've ever sat in a creative review where someone said "I just don't like it," or watched a PR team get blamed for a problem that started long before they showed up, this one is for you.

📖 Get the book: Rules for the Marketing Communications Executive by Prof. Robert Ebo Hinson & Joel Nettey - 0591343421

Watch Episode 5 first if you missed it.

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CHAPTERS:
 00:00 Intro
 04:42 Rule 68
 05:03 Corporate Brief vs Creative Brief
 09:38 Rule 73
 10:27 The "I Don't Like It" Pattern in Creative Reviews
 11:35 Setting Criteria Before You See the Work
 15:07 Rule 74
 15:45 Why Brands Fail
 16:37 Everybody's Posting
 18:17 Building the Architecture 
 20:46 Rule 86
 24:40 The Two Mischaracterizations of PR
 25:41 Image vs Reputation
 26:39 The Naomi Campbell Story 
 29:26 When Reality Catches Up
 30:11 Recap

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There is a gap between strategy and what the audience actually sees. And you can have the sharpest position in the deepest inside, the most priceless segmentation. But if the work that comes out of the other end doesn't translate the thinking into something the consumer can feel, it was all just an intellectual exercise. This episode is about that translation, how strategy becomes creative work, how creative work becomes content, and how the organization's story is protected over time. Creative strategy, ideation process, content systems, visual design, copy and writing. I didn't say copywriting, copy and writing, PR and reputation management. Welcome to The Making, right here on Mart Conversations. This is where I sit with the book. The rules of the Marketing Communications Executive, at this point, are probably tired of me holding the book up to you all the time. But you need to get the book. Right? Because I pick the rules that hit the hardest and tell you what they look like in the real world. Professor Henson and Johnetti put this together for you and I. And I'm trying to bring everybody to the knowledge of it. The lessons here are good for you as a professional, as a business owner, as a founder. So you can listen to it from the lens with which it appeals to you. But the book was essentially written for the marketing communications executive. If you're just joining us, I would encourage you to start from episode one. And if you haven't gotten the book yet, please get it. There is just so much in there that I can't cover alone. And it's better when you're reading along with me. Today we're in part seven of the book Creative Development and Content Systems. There are 20 rules. And I keep saying this, I can't cover all the rules for you. You even get bored. You will watch the whole video. If I did an hour video covering all of the rules in part four, you wouldn't read it. So I'm covering four rules today. I'm covering 68, 73, 74, and 86. Very interesting topics. And these four all follow a chain. If you stay with me, you'll find out. But let me give you a gist of it. Rule 68 is about the brief, the documents that everything starts from. Rule 73 is about how creative work should be evaluated and how it usually gets evaluated instead. Rule 74 is the is the architecture that connects campaigns and the content. And rule 86 is about PR. My favorite topic. Not as spin, but as the long-term discipline of managing your organization's reputation. So the brief, the evaluation, the architecture, the reputation. Four. Let's get into it. Rule number 68. The creative brief is the most important document in the campaign. Write it like it is. Every campaign has a document that determines more about its eventual quality than any other single input. It is not the production budget, it is not the media plan. It is not the creative presentation. It is the creative brief. The document that translates the strategic intelligence builds through all the work of research, insights, segmentation, positioning, and communication architecture into the specific direction that the creative team will use to build the work. A great brief enables great work. A poor brief makes great work structurally very difficult to achieve, regardless of the creative talent applied. The brief is a translation document, not a summary document. Its purpose is not to compress the strategy into a shorter version of itself, it is to translate the strategy with its layers, analysis, its research findings, its positioning logic, all into the form that is most useful for the creative process, which is a single, sharp, actionable insight about the audience and the brand's relationship with them, expressed with enough specificity to generate distinctively targeted work and enough openness to allow genuine creative exploration. The brief is the strategy's most critical translation. A great brief enables great work. A poor one makes it structurally impossible, regardless of the creative talent briefed. Now, briefs in marketing are very important, whether it's a corporate brief or a creative brief. You might be wondering why I'm mentioning a corporate brief when the book is talking about a creative brief. Because there is a significant difference. And in my experience, almost all COC agencies I have worked with, directly or indirectly, work with a creative brief. But everybody talks about the creative brief and overlooks the corporate brief. And that is a problem. Because the two do two different things. The corporate brief is about the business, its objectives, targets, market positions, competitive pressures, revenue goals, and all the corporate jargons that you hear. It answers the question: what does the organization really need to achieve by the end of the year or by the quarter? And this is the brief that would usually come from the client side. And too often it comes in vague. It comes in late, even. They would copy last quarter's report or something of that sort and then add a few words and present it to the agency. And everyone is just supposed to work around it. But the creative brief is about the consumer. So the corporate brief is what the client sends to the agency, but it almost lies on the agency to redevelop that or repurpose that to target the consumer. It's about the behavior, it's about the insights, it's who we are talking to, what do we know about these people we are talking to that is relevant. What is the one thing we want them to take from the campaign that we're about to run? And what should their work feel like? At the end of the day, the bottom line, what should it never feel like? So the corporate brief tells you what the business needs, but the creative brief translates that into what the consumer needs to hear. Feel and experience for the business to get what it needs. Do you get the distinction? So one is the destination, the other is the route. Now, here's where the corporate brief being overlooked matters. The corporate brief is vague. If the business objectives aren't clearly defined, and then the creative brief has nothing solid to transform. The agency is building a route to a destination nobody has properly defined. And the creative team ends up guessing. Not because they lack talent, but because the foundation they were given had nothing to stand on. The creative brief is the strategy's most critical translation. Everything downstream depends on it. The creative team builds from it, the media strategy supports it, the production executes it. And if the brief is sharp, if it has a genuine insight at its center, if it's specific about the audiences, and if it gives their creative team a clear problem to solve with enough room to solve it brilliantly, great work becomes possible. But if the brief is weak, if it's trying to say everything, if the insight is too generic, you haven't asked the relevant questions, if it's accommodating every single stakeholder's opinion instead of making a strategic choice, then it doesn't matter how talented a creative team is. What you get back is beautifully executed irrelevance. Pardon my language. The work might look good, it might win internal approval, but it won't move anyone. Remember, it is about the audience, the consumer. We talked about this in episode three. The brief without insights is just their wish list. And a wish list produces campaigns that generate activity, not outcomes. Most often businesses think they need to do something. You don't. You need to think about the outcome. So whether you're on the client side writing the corporate brief or the agency side writing the creative brief, write it like it's the most important document in the campaign. Because it is. And if you receive a corporate brief from a client, remember what we said in episode three. Dig deeper. Because their surface is bleak. Remember? Okay, so now let's get into rule 73. There's a kind of rule in this. We are halfway through. Rule number 73 evaluates creative work against strategy, not against personal taste. Hmm. Very important. Very, very, very interesting. The creative review meeting is one of the most challenging regular experiences in marketing communications. For a specific reason, though, which is the subject preferences of the people in the room, their clients, the agency, the brand manager, the marketing director, all of which will almost always be expressed in the language of strategy. This doesn't communicate the benefits clearly enough. When their actual objection is personal, I don't like it. So instead of them to say I don't like it, they are just using corporate jargon. The conflation of personal preference with strategic judgment is so pervasive that it has to become the ambient condition of creative reviews rather than a specific failure to be corrected. The antidote is evaluation criteria that is established before the work is seen, derived from the brief and the strategic objectives and applied consistently regardless of the evaluator's personal response to the execution. Evaluate creative work against the strategic criteria established before you saw it, not against the personal taste you formed when you did. The brief is the arbiter, not the boardroom. So I'm trying to talk to all of you egotistic, narcissistic professionals. Those of you who think everything is about you. The whole world revolves around you. We're talking to you. If you've sat in a creative review meeting, you already know what I'm about to talk about. The work goes up and the room goes quiet. And then someone, usually the most senior person in the room, the Mebahya people, say something like, I don't think this communicates their brief clearly enough, or I don't think this communicates their brief clearly enough. Or I'm not sure this will resonate with the target audience. Or can we try something more premium? And what they actually mean, if we're being honest, is I don't like it. That's the pattern. Personal preference dressed up as a strategic language. I don't like the colour because I don't think this is on the brand. This makes me uncomfortable because the audience won't connect with this. The gut reaction gets a strategic costume, and suddenly it sounds like a legitimate objection. And it makes sense why this happens. Creative work is experienced emotionally before it is evaluated irrationally. You see it and you feel something, an attraction, discomfort, excitement, confusion, or whatever it is, think about it. That feeling is real and it's valid. It's valid as a data point, but it's not a strategy. And when that feeling becomes the verdict, when I don't like it, ends the conversation, good work dies in the room for reasons that have nothing to do with whether it would have worked in the market. Think about what happens next. The agency goes back, they soften the edges, they make the logo bigger, they add another message, they make it less edgy. Think about all of that. They show the products more. Each round of feedback sounds reasonable in isolation, but by the third round, the thing that makes their work distinctive, the thing that would have made someone stop scrolling or work twice at the billboard is gone. And what launches is safe, forgettable, strategically hollow. Nobody hates it, but nobody remembers it either. The fix is not complicated, but it requires something most review meetings don't have: discipline. Before the work is presented, establish the criteria it will be evaluated against. Not after you've seen it, before. What did the brief ask for? What are the strategic objectives? Then, when the work goes up, the conversation becomes does this meet the criteria that we've set? Is it relevant to the audience we defined? Or is it clear enough to be understood in that world? Is it distinctive enough to separate us from the competition? Or is it credible? Will it capture attention? Ask all the questions. Relevance, clarity, distinctiveness, credibility, engagement. Those are the criteria. And they apply equally to work you love or work you hate. That's the point. They force the conversation to be strategic rather than personal. The book said the brief is the arbiter, not the boardroom. Not the most senior person's taste, not the loudest voice in the room. If the work meets the brief's objectives, your personal preference is not the conversation. And if it doesn't meet the objectives, say specifically what's missing and why it's missing. Not, I don't like it, try again. That's poor feedback. The consumer doesn't care about what you like, the consumer cares more about whether the work speaks to them. Evaluate creative against the strategic criteria established before you saw the work, not against the personal taste you formed when you did the work. Do you get it? So let's stop being narcissistic and egoistic in the boardroom because we can't be. Let's let creative work be creative and strategic and more relevant. And let it, above all, meet the customer's needs. Rule number 74: content is not campaign. Build the architecture that sustains both. Very interesting. Marketing Communications operates in two different time registers simultaneously. The campaign register is episodic, which is a concentrated best of coordinated high-intensity communication designed to achieve specific objectives over defined periods. The content register is continuous. The sustained ongoing production of communication that maintains the brand's presence, relevance, and relationship with its audience in the spaces between campaigns and throughout the periods when the campaigns are active. Both registers are necessary, neither is sufficient alone. The organization that only produces campaigns has a presence that is intense and episodic, highly visible when the campaign is active, invisible when it is not. The audience's relationship with the brand is defined by the campaign moments rather than by the ongoing engagement. The organization that only produces content has a presence that is continuous but often diffuse. Always there, but never with the concentrated strategic impact that a well-designed campaign delivers. Our declarative statement campaigns create moment, content sustains presence. Build the architecture that makes both work together, or the campaign will always be starting from scratch. Listen, I run a content operation, okay? Mad Conversations is a content operation. So this rule hits close to hope. Joe, thank you very much. But I want to be direct about something that I see happening across this market. Everybody's producing content. Every brand has an Instagram page. Every brand has a social media presence, a social media manager, a social media artist, a content, this, a content that every brand is posting. Codes on Monday, product shots on Wednesday, memes on Friday, the calendar is always full about with content. You watch TikToks and they tell you to create a content calendar here and there. The output is consistent. And most of it is doing absolutely nothing. Because you see, content without a campaign is just noise. And a campaign without content is just a moment that disappears. This is what this rule is getting at. Marketing communications operates in two registers, two completely different rhythms. And most organizations don't understand one of them. The campaign register is episodic, right? It's a concentrated bust, as the book puts it. It's a big idea, a defined period, a specific objective. So you launch it, you run it, you measure it, and then you move on. Campaigns create moments. They would drive the attention for you, they would shift the perception for you, they would move the numbers. But they end. And when they end, the brand goes quiet until the next campaign. Their content register is continuous. It's the ongoing sustained presence that keeps the brand alive between campaigns, right? Between two, any two campaigns. And it maintains the relationship, it keeps you relevant in the face of your consumers. It reminds the audience that you exist, even when you're not running a big push. But content on its own, without the concentrated strategic impact of a campaign, it's just presence without purpose. You are there, but you're not saying anything that matters. Neither is sufficient alone. And this is where most brands in this market are getting it wrong. Some brands only do campaigns. Think about them. Big launch, lots of noise, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay. Then silence for three months until the next one. Every campaign starts from zero because there's been nothing in between to keep the relationship warm, right? The audience has to be reacquired or warmed up every single time a campaign is coming up, and that's expensive and exhausting. Other brands only do content, posting every day, filling the calendar. We call it always on. But what they don't do is they never have the kind of concentrated strategic impact that actually shifts perception or drives behavior. They are always there, but never impactful. The feed is mostly full, but nobody can tell you what the brand actually stands for because the content is reactive. It's filling available time and platform space without a coherent strategic thread. The discipline here is building the architecture that would sustain both. The content system that maintains continuous presence and relationship is what you need. The campaign architecture that delivers concentrated impacts. And this is the part where most people miss. The integration between them that ensures they are expressing the same brand meaning rather than operating as two different brands. The content should be warming the audience for the campaign, building the context, establishing the themes, creating familiarity with the territory the campaign is about to enter. And when the campaign lands, it shouldn't feel like a cold start. It should feel like the natural escalation of something that the audience has already been living with. And after the campaign ends, the content picks up where the campaign left off. It sustains the meaning and it extends the life of the ideas. It keeps the conversation going so the next campaign doesn't have to start from ground zero. That's architecture. Think about it. We said marketers are not decorators, we are architects. The architecture here that a good marketing communications professional would develop is not just posting a schedule, not just a media plan, but a system where campaigns and content feed each other continuously. Campaigns would create moments, we've established that. Content would sustain its presence, we've established that. So you need to build the architecture that makes both work together, or the campaign will always be starting from zero. And you don't want to do that. Let's get into the last one. I promise I'll be softer on this one. Rule number 86. PR is not a spin, it is a reputation strategy. Public relations is among the most misunderstood disciplines in marketing communications, and the misunderstanding operates in two directions simultaneously. From outside the profession, PR is commonly characterized as a spin. The management of perception through selective disclosure, narrative manipulation, and media management designed to make organizations look better than they are. From inside the profession, PR is Sometimes treated as a tactical communications function, media placements, press releases, events management, rather than as the strategic discipline, it is at its best. Strategic PR is the management of an organization's reputation, the structured work of understanding how the organization is perceived by its various stakeholder groups, identifying the gaps between the perception and the organization's values and performance, and designing communication that closes those gaps through honest, evidence-based messaging rather than through the manipulation of impression. A declarative statement: PR is not a spin, it is the ethical management of meaning. The organization that tells its true story compellingly shapes stakeholder understanding. The one that manipulates impression will eventually be corrected by reality. My name is Abekodson, and I do PR work. So I'm going to speak on this from a place that I know very well. PR has an image problem. And the irony of that should not be lost on anyone. It's definitely not lost on me. The discipline that is supposed to manage perception is itself widely misperceived. From the outside, people hear PR and all they think about is spin, damage control, cover-ups. In recent times in the news, there was flooding, and some MPs went out and I could hear someone say, I would see social media posts saying, oh, his PR is working. He's on the ground, you know, his PR is working. What do you think, PR is? The fixer who shows up when the company is in trouble and crafts a statement that says a lot of words without actually saying anything. That's what people think PR is. Usually, that's how it's portrayed in films. So I get the narrative. That's how journalists even talk about it. And honestly, that's how a lot of people see it, the public. I want to say this that there are only two ways of communication. There's journalism and there's propaganda. Most journalists would come, leave media, come to corporate, and do PR. But even they define it wrongly. So PR is in only two forms. Journalism, proper journalism rooted in PR, and propaganda. Please don't mix the two. From the inside, and this is the part that really frustrates me. PR is often reduced to something just as a limiting. Media placements, press releases, event coordination, photo ops, media training, getting the CEO's quotes in the newspaper, getting coverage for the products launch, tactical outputs, things you can count and put in a report. And yes, those things are part of the work. But if that's all PR is in your organization, you've turned a strategic discipline into a task list. Both mischaracterizations are really damaging. The spin narrative diminishes the legitimate and serious work of the reputation management. The tactical reduction strips PR of its strategic seats that it should occupy. And the people who lose mostly are the organizations that never get the full value of what strategic PR can actually do for them. Because you see, strategic PR, which is the real thing, is none of this. It's none of what we've discussed. Strategic PR, really, is the management of an organization's reputation, not its image, its reputation. And there's a difference. Image is what you project. Reputation is what people believe about you based on the accumulated weight of everything they've seen, heard, experienced. Image is campaign. Reputation is a body of evidence. Strategic PR is the structured work of understanding how the organization is perceived by its various stakeholders. We're talking the customers, the employees, the media, regulation, regulators, pardon me, communities, everybody in between. And identifying the gaps between the perception and the reality. And going a step further to design communication that closes those gaps. Not through manipulation, not through anything else, but through honesty, through evidence. The evidence that's presented, through telling the organization's true story more compellingly, as the book suggests, more clearly and more relevantly than the organization could do through paid communication alone. And that distinction truly matters, especially in this market. I remember a story that I think Paul Arden shared, and the anecdotes, as I recall it, Naomi Campbell's people approached him, or in some tellings, a PR firm that the guy managed about improving her public image, right? Which had taken a beating from her reputation. Because, you know, apparently Naomi Campbell at the time she had a temper, she had a pretty difficult behavior. His response to them was essentially that no campaign could fix it. She should just be nice. And the image would follow. The punchline being you can't PR your way out of bad behavior. You can't PR your way out of who you actually are. The person has to change before the perception can. Do you get it? Now, let's come back to our markets. In a market where trust is our biggest barrier to adoption, reputation is not a nice to have. It is a commercial asset. The organization that has built a strong reputation over time has something that no campaign budget can buy. That is the benefit of the doubt. When things go wrong, and things always will go wrong, eventually, if not now, the organization with a strong reputation gets a chance to explain themselves. The organization without one always gets judged immediately. Think about it. I don't want to mention names, but just think about it. Recently there was some organization, there is B in the name, there is V in the name, you know. The organization that tells its true story compellingly shapes stakeholder understanding. The one that manipulates impression will eventually be corrected by reality. Reality always wins. Muhammad Ali says you always have a plan until you're punched in the face, and that's reality. When reality hits, it's like getting punched in the face. You can spin a narrative for a while, but the consumer's experience, the journalist's investigation, the employee's testimony, reality has more patience than any PR strategy. And when it catches up, the gap between what you said and what was true becomes the true story. And that story is often worse than whatever you were trying to hide. So if you're in PR or if you're a leader who works with PR people, understand what the discipline actually is. It's not a spin. I'm tired of hearing this. It is not a spin. It's not just media management, it's the ethical management of meaning. It's the long game of building a reputation that is honest enough to survive scrutiny, compelling enough to earn attention and consistent enough to accumulate trust. Do that work in ordinary times, not when crisis hits. Because ordinary times are the only time you get to build the reputation that will protect you when things get difficult. So, what is part 7 really telling us as we've seen it? Everything starts with the brief. And if the brief is weak, everything built on it is unstable. And it doesn't really matter how talented a team is. When the creative work comes back, evaluate it. Evaluate it against your strategy, not against your personal taste. The brief is an habitat, not the boardroom. But build the architecture that sustains both campaigns and content because campaigns create moments, but content sustains presence. And without both working together, you are either invisible or impactful, but never consistently both. Protect the meaning over time through strategic PR. We're talking public relations. That's PR, public relations, how you relate with the public. Not a spin, not media placement. But the honest, disciplined management of your organization's reputation. Debrie starts the chain, the reputation is where it ends. Everything in between is just craft. Well, so let me ask you. When was the last time you wrote a brief that you were genuinely proud of, if you're a marketing communications executive? When was the last time a piece of creative work was evaluated purely against the strategy and not someone else's personal preference? If someone did that to you yesterday in the office, go and show them this video. And answer me this. When was the last time that your content and your campaigns felt like they were part of the same story? If you're struggling to answer any of those, this episode just showed you where you need to start. You need to start from this book, The Rules of the Marketing Communications Executive by Professor Ibo Hinson and Joe Onete. The details are in the description. There are 20 rules in this chapter. I covered only four. The other 16 are waiting for you to sharpen your brain, to guide you into making thoughtful, meaningful, and impactful decisions that would create excellent work in our environment. Share this episode, drop a comment, tell me which rule challenged you the most and subscribe so you don't miss what's coming. This has been the making right here on Mad Conversations. I've been your mad friend. See you in the next one.