Creative Belongs Upstream

Sep 13

In many projects, there's a moment when someone says, “We should bring in the creative team.”

Too often, that moment comes after most of the creative decisions have already been made.

The objective may be established, or it may still be ambiguous. The audience might be clearly defined or described only in broad terms. Yet somehow, the approach has already begun to harden. Someone has decided that the answer is a video, an event, a website, or some other deliverable. A brief may have been written, even while some of the most important questions remain unanswered.

Then the creatives arrive.

At that point, Creative isn’t really being asked to solve a problem. They’re being asked to execute a solution.

That's backward.

Creative is more than execution

Organizations often treat creative expertise as a downstream capability.

Strategy determines what should happen. Creative determines what it should look like.

But the distinction isn't nearly that clean.

A filmmaker doesn't only understand cameras and editing. They understand attention, emotion, pacing, narrative, and what an audience needs to see to care.

A designer doesn't simply make information attractive. They understand hierarchy, behavior, usability and how people navigate and experience various formats of content.

A writer doesn't merely polish language. Writers think about meaning, framing, voice and what someone needs to understand before they can be persuaded.

A producer doesn't simply organize the execution of an idea. Good producers understand what is possible, what isn't, what an idea requires to succeed and, often, how an initial thought can become something much more powerful.

Those aren't just production skills.

They're problem-solving skills.

And problem solvers are most valuable while the problem is still being solved.

Move the conversation upstream

Consider two conversations.

The first begins like this:

“We need a three-minute video explaining this initiative. Can you help us produce it?”

The second begins differently:

“We need this audience to understand why this initiative matters. How might we do that?”

The difference looks subtle.

It isn't.

In the first conversation, the creative team gets an assignment.

In the second, they've been given a problem.

The answer may be a three-minute video.

But maybe it's a series of 30-second stories. Maybe it's an interactive experience. Maybe it's a live conversation. Maybe the strongest idea combines several formats. Maybe the original problem isn't a content problem at all.

You don't know yet.

That's the point.

Ideation works best when possibilities still exist.

This isn't an argument against strategy

Bringing creative upstream doesn't mean eliminating strategists, marketers, subject-matter experts or business leaders from the process.

Quite the opposite.

The best work I've experienced happens when those disciplines collide early enough to influence one another.

Strategy brings an understanding of the business problem.

Research brings evidence.

Subject-matter experts bring depth.

Marketing brings an understanding of markets and audiences.

Creative brings another form of intelligence: the ability to imagine how an idea might become something people can actually experience.

Those perspectives shouldn't operate as a relay race:

Strategy → brief → creative → production.

There will always be stages, ownership, and decisions. But the thinking itself should be more collaborative.

Strategy should shape creative.

Creative should also challenge strategy.

The cost of bringing creative in late

When creatives enter only at execution, organizations don't simply miss an opportunity to make better-looking work.

They reduce the range of possible solutions.

By the time the creative team arrives, assumptions may already have hardened into requirements.

“We need a video.”

“We need a landing page.”

“We need an event.”

“We need six social posts.”

The conversation becomes focused on how to make those things rather than whether those things are the best answer to the original problem.

And then something predictable happens.

Organizations hire talented creative people for their judgment and imagination, but structure the work so that they primarily use their technical skills.

That's a waste of capability.

The brief should not be the beginning

I still believe in briefs.

I believe in clear objectives, defined audiences, constraints, roles, and accountability. Creative collaboration isn't an excuse for endless brainstorming or ambiguity.

But the brief should capture thinking that creative helped shape—not necessarily represent the first time creative encounters the problem.

Bring the right creative voices into the room when the objective is being explored.

Give them access to the people closest to the problem.

Let them hear the ambiguity before it has been cleaned up into a request.

Ask them what they see.

Then write the brief.

The goal isn't to have more people in every meeting. Most organizations already have enough meetings.

The goal is to involve the right kinds of thinking at the moment when that thinking has the greatest leverage.