CREATIVE EDGE · CREATIVE DIRECTION

That was the CEO’s answer. I’d gone into his office to explain why our sales materials looked like they came from five different companies. Somehow I was walking out with a creative department to run.

I’d been with the company for about twelve years. I started as a freelancer and worked my way up to art director. By then I was working in marketing, which meant our little team got calls from all over the company. Sales needed a presentation. An event was coming up. Someone needed a package that bundled several brands together for an advertiser.

Each brand had its own designers, and they were busy getting their own work out the door. Each had its own fonts, imagery, and way of doing things. That worked fine when you were selling one brand. Put several of them in the same sales deck and you could practically see the seams where somebody had pasted it together.

The new CEO had invited people to bring him ideas, so I made an appointment. My pitch was pretty simple. Give the company one creative services group and a shared set of guidelines for work that represented the whole business. The brands could still look like themselves. The sales team could finally hand somebody a deck that looked like it belonged together.

I wasn’t sure what I was getting into, but I knew one thing. Doors don’t open often if you don’t say yes.

Oh, and then a few years later the company tanked

I fully expected to retire there. Our internal creative services team was humming along. Then “negative EBITDA,” “burn rate,” and “technical insolvency” became part of the vocabulary at our monthly meetings.

The company was being sold. I was driving home, wondering where the hell to start looking for another job.

Then my phone rang. It was HR from a rival publisher. They’d brought their own creative teams together and were looking for someone from outside to run the group. My CEO had recommended me. Until that call, I had no idea another company had been working through the same problem.

I got the job. Suddenly I was in a room with about fourteen people, several of whom had been art directors there for years. I could understand why a new guy coming in to tell them how to work might go over like a lead balloon.

The idea was to operate as an internal agency. Teams across the company were already paying outside agencies for work we could do in-house. We had to make it easy for them to come to us and give them a reason to come back.

Some of that was basic housekeeping. Requests came in any which way. Some might as well have been written on napkins. I had the team set up an online form that sent everything to one inbox. We logged each request in a spreadsheet with a job number, a description, and an estimate of what the same work would have cost with an outside vendor.

At the end of the year, we could show the bean counters what it would have cost to send all that work out. That gave us something concrete to point to when we had to make the case for keeping the work and the team in-house. It also made project managers and editorial staff more accountable. A vague brief or another round of revisions took time, and that time showed up in the numbers.

The harder part was changing what happened after the request came in. If somebody asked for a brochure, you could make them a brochure. You could also ask what they needed it to accomplish. You could also suggest a suite of solutions that kept the creative team in the loop. Sometimes those conversations would change the whole assignment with an eye toward job security.

I wanted people to stretch across disciplines, too. If you could build a website in your sleep, try your hand at video, an animated HTML5 ad, or a long-form white paper. If you’d spent years in print, try a web project.

I remember looking around at all the blank stares at the end of one of those first meetings and thinking, Well, that went over about as well as a PowerPoint in a room full of goats. I’d had plenty of time to get used to the idea. They’d had about twenty minutes.

It’s easier to be a beginner when you have a choice

I get the resistance. You’re good at your job. You’ve got deadlines. Given the choice between doing something you can knock out by lunch and spending the afternoon feeling like an idiot, lunch is looking pretty good.

But I’d been comfortable, too. I thought I knew where I was going to retire. When that fell apart, the experience that got me my next job started with a problem I could easily have kept griping about at my desk.

So here’s the question I asked that team.

“When was the last time you tried something for the first time?”

It can be small. Take one piece of a project you’d normally hand off and ask somebody to walk you through it. Or take that problem you complain about every week, write down what you’d change, and make the appointment. Both can feel awkward. It’s a lot easier to have an awkward afternoon when your next paycheck isn’t riding on it.

I hope this gave you something to think about. More from the Steve Blender soon. To be continued.