THE TRUTH ISSUEWhat’s most benefi cial, from an
ROI perspective, is if you’re able
to drive your objectives from
an awareness and conversion
perspective and loosen your
guidelines. It benefi ts everyone.What does the Shutterstock
Custom workfl ow look like from
a brand submitting its brief to
receiving its content?
Taking a step back, the core principle
is moving from a managed structure
to a network structure. With a
managed structure, you own all the
resources and then you optimise
that work fl ow – the value chain – to
get the exact output that you want.
That’s great but it doesn’t scale,
because if you want to increase
capacity you have to add more fi xed
physical resources. On the network
model, you’re really optimising the
point of value or the interaction
which is content creation – to do that
consistently you need software.
The way we work is: we adjust a
brand’s look and feel. The concept
of a ‘look and feel’ can be somewhat
abstract, which makes enabling that
challenging. We created a process
called a ‘visual identity calibration’
where we take all of that stuff as
an input and distil it down into
measurable and tangible creative
variables – technical variables
like lighting, composition, colour,
contrast and then subject matter
and environments.
So you could take any asset
and basically look at the checklist
that we’ve confi gured it against and
determine whether it’s on or off
brand. It’s a really good way to distil
the cerebral notion of what a brand is.
If I’m a marketer who says, ‘Oh,
it has to feel premium’, what doesthat mean? Everyone has a different
interpretation of that, so when you
cast a really wide net you have to
eliminate all of that subjectivity.
Then we structure the briefs.
If we’re doing an auto shoot, an
in-restaurant shoot or a lifestyle
shoot with certain people,
we need certain information,
but we don’t need everything. So
we try to capture the minimal
amount of stuff to make it easier
for the marketers, but also easier
for the creatives.How should marketers be best
implementing audience insight
data in social media and content
strategies?
When you think about a brief, we
see it in three different layers:
the strategic layer, the campaign
layer and the production layer.
The agencies’ sweet spot is the
campaign and production brief, so
they’re able to translate the insight
on the audience or the customer into
something like a creative theme or a
creative story and ultimately how to@marketingmag