Designity

AI raised expectations. Budgets didn't magically grow. Maybe it's time to rethink how we scale marketing teams. #MarketersDeserveBetter

What truly makes a great creative director? Here’s what Marcus Viljoen, an expert with 10 years of experience, has to say: https://hubs.la/Q04zqDKC0

Let's talk business! Your team can work extremely hard for 90 days and still make almost no progress. Everyone can be busy, calendars full, slack exploding, and projects getting completed. And then the quarter ends and you ask: What actually changed? Sometimes the uncomfortable answer is… not much. That’s why I’ve become a big believer in something that sounds pretty boring, slightly scary, but is extremely important: OKRs. At the beginning of every quarter, I believe a company needs a North Star. Where exactly are we trying to go? That should be based on where the company is today, what’s happening in the market, and the larger vision of the company. Once that’s clear, every department should ask: What are we going to do to help the company get there? Those become the initiatives. Projects. Campaigns. Experiments. Recurring activities. New systems. Whatever we believe will move the company toward that goal. But this is where I think companies get it wrong: Completing the project is not success. Projects are bets. “We believe if we do X, Y will happen.” KRs tell us whether those bets are actually paying off. KPIs help us understand the activity, pace, and health of the work along the way. Here’s the simplest analogy I can think of. Imagine the company decides it needs to reach the 100th floor of a tower. That’s our destination. Now the team creates a plan. We need a ladder. We need a rope. We need water. We need safety equipment. We need a strategy for climbing. Those are our initiatives. Then we need to measure what’s actually happening. Are we on floor 20? Floor 50? Floor 80? Are we climbing at the pace we expected? That’s where the KRs and KPIs come in. The problem is that organizations often start celebrating the equipment instead of the destination. “We built the ladder!” Great. What floor are we on? “We finished the campaign!” Great. What number did it move? “We launched the new website!” Great. What business result changed? A company can have incredibly talented people working incredibly hard and still go nowhere. That’s something we’re trying very hard to avoid at Designity. It’s not about working harder. It’s about working intentionally and effectively. Every meaningful initiative should have a reason for existing. What KR is this supposed to move? How will we know whether it worked? And does that result actually move us toward the company’s North Star? And we shouldn’t wait until the end of the quarter to find out. If we’re trying to reach the 100th floor and three weeks later we’re still on floor 10, that’s telling us something. Maybe our strategy is wrong. Maybe our assumptions were wrong. Maybe we need a different ladder. That’s why I don’t think OKRs should be treated as a quarterly report card. They’re a navigation system. They force us to continuously separate activity from progress. Because if we’re still on the 12th floor at the end of the quarter, I really don’t care how beautiful the ladder was. Agree?

Working on the Designity blog means I get to work with our Creative Directors a lot, and honestly, they catch EVERYTHING. The yellow that’s just slightly off from the iconic Designity yellow.  The alignment that looks perfectly fine to me…  The inconsistency I somehow missed after staring at it for an hour. 😅 Having that second pair of expert eyes makes such a difference. And our CDs somehow manage to be ridiculously sharp while also being some of the friendliest people to work with! Creative direction: because sometimes you really do need someone to CD what you can’t see. 😉 We wrote a little more about why Designity's Creative Directors are essential for growing teams: https://lnkd.in/eMiUe4b4

Think great Creative Directors have all the answers? 👀 Plot twist: the best ones ask better questions. Get 8 tips from Designity CD Marcus Viljoen, backed by 10+ years of creative experience: https://hubs.la/Q04zqDKC0

More creative capacity can mean more briefs, feedback, vendors, and people to manage. For mid-market teams, the missing piece might be creative leadership. Here’s what that looks like: https://hubs.la/Q04zgbSy0

More campaigns. More channels. More stakeholders. More specialized creative needs. Growth has a funny way of turning a creative capacity problem into a marketing problem. Our latest blog breaks down how Creative-as-a-Service helps growing teams add capacity, capabilities, and creative leadership as demands increase: https://hubs.la/Q04z740Z0

No one knows what it means, but everyone’s aligned. 🤝

Standard Chartered's new “Move Ahead” campaign uses Formula 1 to tell a story about preparation: the decisions and teamwork behind a defining moment. The creative team combined real photography, design, post-production, and AI-generated environments to create racing perspectives that would have been difficult (or even impossible!) to capture. Check the video here: https://lnkd.in/dHmVHxQh The images in this carousel are illustrations of the story, not assets from Standard Chartered’s campaign. Sources: Standard Chartered and Campaign Brief Asia.

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