How to Empower Your Creatives on the Inside and Out

As part of the CMO Reboot Playbook: Realigning Resources for a Modern Marketing Support Mix, former Rodan+Fields CMO Elisabeth Charles shares how the brand was able to empower its internal and external creative teams to deliver on all their business needs. Check out more plays from top CMOs and brand leaders here. THE CHALLENGE Sometimes our internal team would be challenged from a bandwidth perspective to deliver on the business needs (eg. multiple product launches happening simultaneously or successively), as well as a lack of resources to do the kind of diligence we needed to truly understand the current external business environment and whitespace opportunities. We also found that as we tried to extend our reach to new, younger customer segments (eg. Millennials and Gen Z), it benefited us to work with agencies who specialized in speaking to these customers. This was especially true as we considered how to optimize our activation and media strategies. It was important that our internal creative team did not feel like all the meaty, strategic projects were being outsourced and that they were stuck just executing basics. And for the external team, they needed to understand our key business objectives and overall brand intimately. THE APPROACH As we onboard external creatives, it is critical that they really understand our brand and can deliver creative that is consistent with the brand and lives seamlessly with the rest of the internal work. In order to maximize internal/external collaboration and integration, it is important that that our internal head of creative has a key seat at the table with the agency. For that reason, I ask them to manage the agency relationship with strong partnership from the head of brand. It was important that our internal creative team did not feel like all the meaty, strategic projects were being outsourced and that they were stuck just executing basics. For large initiatives that required a coordinated 360 approach, we created a weekly multi-agency meeting with our internal creative leaders so that they could build on each others’ ideas and optimize the overall approach across all touchpoints. To drive a strong sense of internal ownership and empowerment with the external creative, we had the internal teams flesh out the ideas across all usages and touchpoints. THE IMPACT The most important impact is that the critical work of the business gets delivered, especially during very demanding times. It allows the business to be reactive, fast paced and innovative. By leveraging external creative help, we are able to get a more comprehensive approach that incorporates insights from the culture, competitors and customers. This especially helped us communicate with younger customer segments. Our external creative partners were able to give us more technical executions (eg. animated or 3D graphics) that couldn’t be done in-house. In some cases, our internal teams were able to learn from outside agencies and eventually bring that capability in-house. By having the internal and external creative teams work together, they feel joint ownership and have a shared understanding of the business objectives and outcomes. This hybrid resourcing solution is also more cost-effective than outsourcing all creative. KEY TAKEAWAYS Make sure that your internal creative team understands why they are working with external creative resources. Try to take the emotion and ego out of the equation.Provide clarity on the role of each team (internal and external) and articulate the level of collaboration you expect.Be thoughtful when allocating the marketing calendar work over the year. Ensure that the internal creative teams are getting substantive creative projects that contributes to the overall business.Help reinforce effective creative management skills for your internal leaders so that they’d get the best work from our outside creative partners vs micromanaging them.Continuously evaluate the impact of a hybrid creative model. While it can be a little more expensive overall, it gives a unique insight and creative that you can't easily duplicate in-house.

CMO Reboot Playbooks

How to Empower Your Creatives on the Inside and Out

Former Rodan + Fields CMO shares how the brand used a hybrid creative model to deliver on their business needs

THE CHALLENGE

Elisabeth Charles

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Elisabeth Charles