A successful marketing campaign for the growth of your business is all about selecting the right creative partner who embraces your vision, captures its essence, brings a distinctive X-factor, and delivers! It’s about experience, talent, and infrastructure, and a skill that sets apart the best of agencies, empathy ... Empathy?
Empathy - understanding the domain as well as the professional and company goals of the client - is paramount to achieve that seamless relationship that let’s clients think of their creative partner as just an extension of the team. It starts small and it builds trust. It’s in every conversation. Here are some telltale signs:
Medicine not requirement ?
Does the creative partner seek to understand the requirement, e.g. the animation storyboard it needs to process your project, or do they “get” the medicine. Very few agencies will have personnel who are from the industry and have product managed a drug or device.
Experience that is palpable
An agency that has done thousands of animations has should also have understood hundreds of procedures and scores of drugs. Many Drug Mechanism of Actions at a core cellular level are similar to other drugs from entirely different industries. The same is true for procedures. An ablation procedure in one part of the body can be similar visually to a cauterization elsewhere. Having experience, combined with domain knowledge, results in faster turnaround, better quality and lower cost. Experience also breeds empathy; understanding client pressures and preempting potential issues.
Main biz or side biz ?
Many agencies take projects in TV / Advertising / entertainment and even gaming. Few are truly tailored to the medical space. This can be argued as a benefit, but most often it’s not. Media production for entertainment is outwardly glamourous and inwardly scrappy. It is a manic, coffee-laden, often band-aid approach to creatives. And for medicine, it sometimes produces flair, sometimes disaster, but always uncertainty. Look for an agency that specializes in your business, they will have optimized cost for the type of projects you will have. Prefer better project management to fancy editing sweets that can do real-time rendering of special effects.
Relationship or showmanship ?
Every company will rattle off their client lists, industry background or show past projects. So how do you know who you would want to be with down in the trenches? It’s simple - discuss the project idea with them in an open way and see if they brainstorm with you as opposed to tell you what to do. Offering ideas or talking about prior examples of something they’ve done that could be interesting for this idea, are good ways to tell. If they follow you down the rabbit hole instead of immediately trying to suss out animation length, budget etc then you know they are trying to build a relationship, not just mentally filling a proposal document.
X-factor
Their are only three types of X-factors: Visual / End-Product, Process Management, Empathy. Visual is easy to glean for, as companies parade out their showreels in front of them. Process is hard, because clients are not geared up to ask questions about how a creative team works. The assumption is that everything works well under the hood. Empathy stems from being vulnerable. Expose a little of the internal knowledge that your team does not typically share with an external agency and check for recognition, understanding and the ability to adjust to new information that may not be directly related to the storyboard.
How to apply B-school vendor selection principles while picking a creative agency
Selecting the right creative partner is a challenge that traverses products and industries. The process of vendor selection is further complicated because of the subjective nature of creative projects. Still, using a classic business tool - The Project Management Triangle - to assess potential vendors. Read More..
