Internal creative organizations often struggle with whether they should be charging clients and if so, at what rate. This doesn’t seem like a complex challenge, until you try to solve it! In this post I’ll touch on good reasons for implementing a chargeback model, costs that should be considered for inclusion, key considerations, and implementation [...]

It is the elephant in the room that nobody knows is there until it moves in the wrong direction.  A healthy corporate culture can be one of the most, if not the most, valuable assets to a Creative Executive. The quantifiable outcomes of a healthy corporate culture can be tied to increased productivity, higher employee [...]

In-house creative services teams with an hourly chargeback model must track their time—often to the quarter-hour increment. The discipline of time tracking can be off-putting for many teams at first, but the advantages of time tracking can’t be ignored, and teams generally support the practice once they understand the potential outcomes. The advantages are so [...]

The beauty of your Creative team is that their brains work differently from legal, accounting or HR.  It’s beneficial to approach training programs with appreciation for and awareness of the differences so you can target the training to the Creative audience.  A general course targeted for the masses with linear and tactical examples will be [...]

Often when I work with marketing and creative services organizations, a piece of technology that is usually missing is Dynamic Authoring, or Content software. For some reason, there isn’t recognition of the value of this tool outside of generating things like direct mail or email campaigns. So, here’s another take on the value of these [...]

Many in-house creative services and communications groups grew organically as a result of an organizational unit deciding to hire a few people to do more cheaply (and perhaps more quickly) what the company was paying external agencies to do. The overwhelming majority of such groups start small with informal roles and processes. If there are only three or four people working in such a group, anyone can call up one of the designers and ask for work. This initial contact person becomes, by default, the requestor’s account manager and traffic manager. Such informality works well if it’s a small group of people who all sit together.

Speak to any executive, regardless of industry, and they’ll always be fascinated to hear how other companies run similar functions. When used correctly, benchmarking can be an extremely effective learning and validation tool for leaders who are trying to improve their corporate operation, but benchmarks can also cause leader’s to misstep when not reviewed in context.

Managers can improve or destroy an employee’s performance by up to 40% . Therefore it’s extremely important that managers are focusing their efforts on the most meaningful activities when spending time with direct reports including building deep relationships with each team member.

In-house creative groups have plenty of challenges working with their customers, who range from marketing managers to technical experts to the CEO’s executive admin.  These customers often look at the creative group as a free support resource and picture them just sitting by the phone or computer waiting for their favorite customer to call with [...]

There is currently a lot of buzz about using social media for marketing by encouraging grassroots enthusiasm for a company’s products.  Much has been written and discussed about various tactics for effective use of social media marketing.  But what we help clients wrestle with, and what we don’t hear discussed much in the world of [...]