Marketing for Good: A New Checkbox in the Creative Brief

Written by 5ivecanons Creative Staff

Most creative briefs ask some version of the same questions. Who are we talking to? What do we want them to do? What’s the budget? And how soon can we have it?

These are necessary questions. They are the basic questions we’ve been told we need to gather since ad school. But no one told us about what could be the most important part of the brief we should be asking: How could our work help community?

We spend our workdays focused on meeting the brief, on building on the brand, optimizing our messaging, running QA through the machine, testing on every device, and checking all our boxes. But we’re not thinking about how it can connect the dots to the community we’re living in.

This is the conversation we’re bringing to Adobe MAX this November. Rethinking the pitch to clients, adding community to the creative brief, and exploring how we can build ideas that do something useful for both.

Start with another question

A client comes to us with a business problem. They need more awareness, more customers, a better website, or help explaining something that makes perfect sense to them and absolutely no one else.

Our job is to understand that problem and come back with something that works.

Adding community to the brief gives us another question to explore during that process. What does this business have, know, or do that could be useful to the people around it? Maybe it’s expertise. Space. Equipment. Relationships. Or the ability to reach people an organization has been trying to reach for years.

There may be a good idea sitting in that overlap. We have to give ourselves a reason to look for it.

Make it a pitch someone can approve

Clients have budgets, deadlines, and people they need to answer to. If we want them to consider an idea with a community component, we need to do the work to make it make sense.

Why this organization? Why this effort? How does it connect to the business? What will each side contribute, and who is responsible for making it happen?

Imagine a home services company trying to build awareness in a new market. A useful pitch might connect its team’s expertise with a local organization helping residents maintain safe homes. The company has an opportunity to demonstrate its work and build relationships. The organization gets help addressing a need it has identified.

That last part matters. We need to ask what would help before showing up with a campaign already designed.

Then we need to budget for the execution, agree on responsibilities, and decide what success looks like for everyone involved. Community partners have limited time and resources, too.

We have to make room for it ourselves

At 5ivecanons, we’ve spent years working toward a business that makes room for family, community, and life outside work.

Our four-day workweek helps. But even with that extra day, there’s always something competing for the hours.

That’s part of what I wrote about in PTV: Paid Time Volunteering. Making time to get involved can require support from the place where we spend so much of our week.

It also gets us away from our screens and into conversations we might otherwise miss. We meet the people doing the work. We learn what they need, what they’ve already tried, and where we might be useful.

Those relationships can inform the ideas we bring back to the office. It’s a lot easier to recognize an opportunity when you know the people it could help.

Build the intention into what comes next

That thinking is also part of why we’re bringing OCDBees to market.

We built a project management tool for our own team and spent more than a decade using and refining it. It helps keep our work organized and makes our four-day workweek possible.

Now we’re opening it up to others for $3 per user, per month. As it grows, our ambition is to direct a portion of its profits toward organizations doing good in their communities.

We still have work ahead of us to make that happen. But it belongs in the decisions we’re making now, while we’re building the business.

The same is true of a creative brief. Putting community in the conversation early gives us a chance to plan for it, fund it, and follow through.

Let’s compare notes at Adobe MAX

On Wednesday, November 11, at 11:30 a.m., I’m leading a Braindate in the Braindate Lounge at Adobe MAX in Miami Beach:

Marketing for good. Concepting and executing ideas that help brands, and community.

We’ll talk about rethinking the pitch, executions that have worked, and how to make community part of the brief from the beginning.

I’d love to hear what you’ve tried. What got a client excited? What was harder to execute than you expected? What would you do differently?

Come join us. We spend a lot of time asking people to pay attention. Let’s spend some time thinking about what we can do with it.

Adam Schaffer
Chief Creative Officer