Why You Should Never Fall in Love With the Creative

It’s the process (not the individual pieces) of content marketing that win the game in the long run.

I used to get paid to make cell phones fly.

No, really. My main client at BBDO was a major cellular network here in the US (hint: they used to use a lot of orange) and we were doing a ton of display work for them. I lead a team that produced probably 500 animated and rich media banners, and they were full of spinning, rotating, flying cell phones which did a pretty good job of catching the eye of online readers.

The iPhone had only just launched so there were a lot more types of cellphone on the market. Sliders, flips, candybars, phones with physical keyboards. The works.

The folks in orange could see the smartphone wave about to overtake the market, so our goal was presumably to sell off this stockpile of dumbphones before that happened.

So we had to create a huge amount of ads, and one way we scaled production was to develop system using templated creative. This way, we could insert a new phone model, images, and copy without having to recreate the entire piece each time.

It worked great. We fine-tuned a few versions and set up our process. Each time we were asked to sell a new phone, we could swap out the graphics, add in the phone images or 3D models, and boom: brand new ad.

But to me, the really interesting part was how much variance there was in the performance of each piece of creative.

I’m not kidding when I say these ads were practically identical. We sometimes ran 10 or more at the same time, and the only substantially different thing was the picture of the phone. But the clickthroughs on some of these ads were like 3X the others.

And the model of phone didn’t really seem to matter. The results would come in from our media agency, and the crappiest LG slider phones would outperform the newest, slickest Blackberry offerings. Or vice versa. Week over week, independent of targeting, the performance seemed to shift for no discernable reason.

I saw just how unpredictable creative work can be in the short term.

But it was working, and we were selling phones. So the important thing was that we kept up the work. Nobody got too bogged down in the creative details, and they certainly didn’t hold up the process with their creative opinions, because they didn’t need to.

Week after week we cranked out new ad versions and at the end of the year, the overall effect was that the client’s business grew by another 10% and everyone was happy when they renewed for another year.

Can you really predict how the creative will perform?

Fast forward to today and I see the same thing in the content world.

At Fractl, we come up with a ton of creative content ideas. I’m serious when I say it’s not uncommon for the creative team to put 50+ ideas into a spreadsheet in a single morning. And we hold these ideation meetings daily.

The idea vetting process usually cuts that number down, but typically a handful of ideas get approved for production each day. And once you add in the ideas our clients often suggest, you can see how we can end up producing over a hundred content marketing pieces each month.

Production is lead by an experienced content producer, advised by an expert team of digital PR professionals, and vetted and approved through a rigorous peer review process.

And still…we get surprised by the performance numbers all the time.

Assets we fell in love with in production? Sometimes they fall flat.

Assets we produced to target a specific audience and weren’t expecting a huge response? Sometimes they kill it. Like, they get dozens and dozens of backlinks.

The most successful content brands keep playing the field

The lesson? Content is a long game. Each individual asset, campaign, or article may not perform the way you want it to. In fact it probably won’t. But as long as you remember a simple rule, you’re going to win:

Don’t fall in love with the creative. Just keep creating.

There is no single content idea that’s going to win in the long run. And even your home runs will be copied and done better by your competition next year.

The only way to win is to put a solid content creation process in place. That way you can keep the predictable AND unexpected wins coming.

Good content producers are humble

Good content producers don’t get caught up in debates of opinion over a single piece of content. They design each part of the process for the highest chance of success. They analyze past wins and set up standards to vet new work against benchmarks. 

And when your process is good, you can just trust it and usher work carefully and thoughtfully through the steps.

You know you’ll hit on a winning formula more times than not. So you don’t have to stress too much about any particular piece of creative.

Even if you love it. Even if it’s your favorite.

Great clients understand this part of the content creation process

They make it easy by trusting their creative people, and understanding that content is a long game.

They understand the often unspoken truth that as long as your creative work is solid, it’s almost impossible to predict which ideas will succeed. They know the important thing is to keep creating, and they’re happy to let us do that.

Because really…we’re not sure where the next big win is going to come from. But we know that by trusting the process, we’ll be sure to discover it.