Insights / Agency

Reviewing creative with stakeholders

We call them "internals", as lots of places do, so we formally check in with our account managers, our account director teams, and our strategists, because it's really important to make sure that we're on strategy, we're on brief. So much work goes in before we actually receive the brief, and making sure that clients have agreed to what the brief is, and what the direction is overall, the strategic direction. It depends on what project we're working on, sometimes they happen every day if the timing is really short, or they can happen as as a drive-by or someone pops by your desk.

On bigger projects when we have more time, sometimes we'll put a bunch of work up on the wall and invite a bunch of people in. I love to bring as many people in as early on as possible for ideas, feedback, checking-in, making sure that things are on on track, it comes from all different all different directions. We'll schedule a series of them depending on who's available and what's appropriate, different projects require different levels of intervening.

We also have an internal peer review where once we're all collaboratively happy with the work, we share 15 different ideas and go through and share strengths and weaknesses of each of those pieces of work. That's with not only the creative team, but also people with different backgrounds make sure that the work is inclusive that it's not offensive, it's open, that it's progressive. We try and do our checks and balances along the way, and I think it's important to remember that nothing is real until it's out there in the world. There's always opportunity for change, evolution, there's opportunity to make something better, to keep tweaking something. That's something that we do frequently, and so I love sharing work.

We often bring our clients in, we call them "working sessions", it's a collaborative meeting where we don't present work and say "this is it, this is your final logo, packaging, concept", we make sure it's collaborative. It's really important to hear them, they know their business very well, of course we want to push different people in different situations, and push them out of their comfort zone when it's appropriate. But they know their business, and we need to be respectful of that, and then they respect us because they know that we know ours.

Reviewing creative with stakeholders

Clients: Vancouver Airport AuthorityLululemonCanadian Media FundKoho