Navigating the tension between creative and marketing teams
How to improve the marketing x creative divide, with thoughts from Creative Director Amanda Rios.
Happy 'Friday-before-the-holidays'! I'm sure marketing dilemmas are exactly what you're itching to read as you race through your to-do list or bury yourself in a cookie pile!
These next couple weeks are admittedly weird ones in the marketing and media world. Things slow down and audiences are less engaged, yet nothing is ever fully 'off'. Brands keep posting on social (even when they don’t need to), the news cycle charges forward, and many clients shift into 'planning' mode. I'm taking a similar approach: using this slower time to dream big for my clients and for The Purse (sorry in advance to Lindsey for the inevitable holiday Slacks). But I'm also making time to truly unplug, spend time with family, and gather with friends!
This week, I received a great question from a marketer navigating tension between the marketing and creative teams - a challenge that's sadly all too common. For this one, I brought in my dear friend and former colleague Amanda Rios. I've often found that friction between marketing and creative stems from not understanding each other's perspectives, objectives, and working styles. So, I decided to bring in someone who has built and led numerous creative teams!
A brief bio brag: Amanda most recently served as Creative Director at Kickstarter, co-founded Ladies, Wine, Design Brooklyn, and has been the visionary creative behind many brands you know and love. She's consistently my go-to person when I need someone with both vision and talent, plus she and I have had countless conversations about these exact marketing-creative dynamics over the years.
Calling on Amanda to Answer your Marketing Challenge this week
“I run marketing but our creative team sits within a different department and there is brewing tension between my direct report and the design teams. How do I create a better relationship between marketing and creative?”
- Head of Marketing at a Series B start-up
From Amanda:
I have led creative teams in-house in both cases where the creative team sat within the marketing team and the other-separate from the marketing team. Without knowing the specifics, there are some areas to bring the relationship together.
1. Approach the situation with unbiased curiosity.
As you sit in a position of leadership, it's important to have healthy conversations that keep employees on both teams feeling safe as you learn more about the current dynamic. First, these two teams need to identify what is not working in the dynamic and improve. Some questions for the teams to reflect on:
What is the situation that brought this tension to light?
What is the behavior from both teams that can improve?
How will teams be held accountable to improve this situation?
2. Establish more alignment.
Work suffers where there is not internal alignment. In my early days of managing designers, I was fortunate to have managers that challenged me to build relationships across various functions at the company. At first, this can seem like a lot more work, but it pays off when it streamlines communication and builds confidence in collaboration. Questions and examples for improving alignment:
Are there currently shared goals between the two teams? If not, how can you work with leadership on both teams to create them from the top?
Your direct report needs to build and maintain a collaborative relationship with a peer (or two) that sits on the creative/design team.
Encourage your direct report to learn more about the creative process. This will create more empathy and improve communication across both teams. In turn, this also allows your direct report to share marketing priorities with the creative team.
Are you aligned with the leaders of the creative team that correlate to your level? If not, this would also be a good start to further improve the dynamic of the two teams. This will also help you coach employees through future tension if needed.
Is there a meeting that the creative/design team holds that your direct report can join? Maybe not every week, but even once a month or quarterly would give your direct report more insight into the inner workings of the team.
Where do the marketing team and creative team communicate? Is there a dedicated channel? If not, can there be? Be sure to define the purpose of the space, possibly a place to share inspiration and big ideas between both teams?
3. Understand the perspective of the creative team.
Moving through work and shooting off requests disregarding the needs and capabilities of the creative team to do their work is a quick way to lose mutual respect. Gaining a better understanding of their needs and workflow can improve the relationship.
Designers are strategic thinkers. Use them for this, don't disregard it, just because they are not the one collecting data and adding it to a deck. Good ideas don't happen in a vacuum. Looping in someone from the creative team earlier on in a request can lead to more creative ideation that leads to stronger output and collaboration.
Consider the unseen work that is part of the design process, such as research (mood boards), iteration, feedback from within the team (designers & design manager/director). You can dig into areas that can brew friction, by figuring out if the team has what they need. Ask them what this is for them, and ask them what can improve in the future:
How is the work/collaboration being requested of the creative team? Is this going through a proper channel?
Does the creative team have the opportunity to ask questions? Receive answers?
If marketing is providing copy, is it locked and provided at the time of request?
Is there a clear stakeholder that has final approval?
Are they given enough time? Are they able to give input on the timeframe?
How will feedback be delivered from the marketing to the creative team? Is it in the right channel?
Hopefully these questions give you a strong way to empower both teams to improve their collaboration and communication.
👋
Interested in submitting your burning marketing and media questions? Drop them here! Want to answer one as a guest? Email me!
Other things catching my attention this week
This twitter (ugh, X) thread from New York Magazine Union, obviously
I found this 2024 State of Social Media breakdown by Taylor Lorenz extremely useful
And just for fun: Emily Gould on the publisher party ‘glory days’ in The Cut
Shameless Plugs
My client Eddie AI is doing a 30 day program for marketers who make videos! Highly recommend joining, you’ll get tons of hands-on editing support in exchange for your feedback on the product. Form here!
The Purse has a great Instagram and we want to hit 2,000 followers this week, so go follow us and help us hit our goal!
I’m booking 1:1 discovery calls with founders and marketers in January to explore new ways Tactile (my marketing studio) can support you! If you’re interested, just reply to this email!