Every organisation has a unique way of working, quirks and idiosyncrasies that have developed over time. Depending on the nature of those ways of working, some businesses can more easily embed new approaches to use on a daily basis, like the agile process Loops offers, and some can’t.
There is no one-size-fits-all creative process, and each business and creative agency will eventually establish what works best for them.
But what if there was a more efficient way to produce creative brand and marketing output that’ll fully capture your client’s vision?
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Agile creative development, like agile thinking, starts with having the right mindset, which doesn’t happen overnight and sometimes meets resistance. Yes, ‘agile’ can feel like another overused buzzword, but if you agree the world moves increasingly fast and that customer centricity is essential to success, it’s probably the best way to describe how to continuously react and win.
In developing creative projects, agile creativity is a continuous loop of feedback, collaboration, problem solving, and testing, until the creative project’s final product or end goal is achieved.
Like anything new, seeing is believing. This is why one of our internal KPIs is speed to results. We know that getting through the agile creative process to the data quickly is the best way to showcase value, which is why we offer a no-risk pilot project to demonstrate agile creative development in a real world context and in real time.
But, before starting a pilot project with us, we recommend looking over these simple, three point checklists to get an idea if Loops is a viable fit for your organisation, and making sure everyone is on the same page.
Checklist 1: The culture
Your team members won’t be able to adapt to agile processes overnight — it takes time, but there are plenty of tools, like Loops, that can help speed up the process and offer more insight. In order to achieve full agile creative success, you need to think on the core values of your company:
- Is the business actively looking to transform how it delivers creative work, or are you only mildly interested? If you’re not fully bought-in, agile methodologies will feel like extra work and that friction will impact potential.
- Are you eager to be significantly faster to market, and speed up decision making? As in three to five times faster?
- Is design thinking and consumer centricity high up the leadership agenda? Do senior strategists and creatives genuinely value consumer data and keenly seek to incorporate it into the design process, or is it usually an afterthought?
Checklist 2: Getting sh*t done
The thing about agile creative development is that it changes the pace of productivity from a long jog to short sprints. Creative teams will need to work at a fast turnaround time in order to maximise creative output and embody the spirit of iterative campaigns. Here’s a few questions to ask yourself and your team about the agile approach:
- Does your team have a ‘just do it’ attitude? As opposed to holding too many meetings that debate everything and anything? Giving your team well defined tasks and setting out exactly what needs to be done can help increase productivity and save time.
- Is faster learning more highly valued than crafting and finessing at every step of the creative project? As in, do you buy that “perfect is the enemy of good”?
- Are you confident setting tangible goals and trusting the process, but ok with not knowing exactly how things will turn out?
Checklist 3: People & permission
Before fully committing to the agile process, here’s a few points about the higher-ups behind in your creative teams you need to consider first:
- Is there a top-down mandate? Has someone in the C-Suite (ideally the CEO) put their backing behind implementing agile methodology? This is mission critical!
- Can you trust those who want to adopt agile creative thinking into their process to do so without any sign off from seniors or clients? Removing blockers is likely to result in more progress rather than problems.
- Do you have an internal evangelist, someone relatively senior (and respected) who’s championing all the above and on a mission to make this work?
The watch out!
Is there a Buzz Killington in the house? In any marketing team or creative team, there will always be team members who’re resistant to change, who aren’t content with consistent testing and no clear idea of what the final outcome will be. They need to be quickly won over, or removed from creative projects before they stifle it.
In summary
Achieving agile creative success is all about continuous learning and experimentation, and while there’s a lot of emphasis placed on iteration and making fast decisions, it does carve out time for essential reflection and analysis. It’s about consistently returning to the drawing board with your client’s feedback and user stories in order to figure out the next steps in the process to reach the desired end goal.
Loops simply takes the iterative process of product design, and the agile approach found in software development, and applies it to the creative process, thereby providing you with the easy-to-digest quantifiable data to help you improve your creative output and encourage stakeholders’ backing those big bang campaigns.
