Advertising’s Most Expensive Problem Happens Well Before We Make Anything

We've built a creative process that separates the thinking from the making. And it's costing us.

by Laura Wimer Jewell

As a creative director for the past 20 years, I’ve learned that the people I most want solving problems with my creative team are the photographer, director, producer and DP: the people who are in the space when the camera is on.

Not just because they make us all feel cool. But because their taste, strategy, experience and practical knowledge should influence the idea before it gets locked by a brand. I want them invested in the business rather than simply awarded the work on the other end of a triple bid.

And, conversely, keeping the creatives who shaped the idea closer to production practicalities doesn’t stunt them — it evolves their abilities to think beyond the dream state. Creatives (in-house or agency) need different kinds of collaborators to grow. The echo chamber of their own department never challenges them enough.

In this brave new world of AI, dwindling budgets, ever-consolidating holding companies and internal memos that keep production in-house, we need an updated system. We live in a world where the volume and speed of what brands need is changing by the hour, but the creative process to get to an approved idea is stuck in the 1970s.

In other words, it’s time for the creative process to accumulate, not restart once production begins.

Death by too much discussion

The industry still lives in the opposite: a relay race. An agency develops the strategy and the idea, gets it approved after an unholy number of rounds, sends it into a triple bid with a new producer, awards the job and then finally brings the people making the work into the process (often months after the creative thinking began).

Every handoff is a restart. A new team gets briefed, old decisions get reverse-engineered and production inherits an avalanche of choices it had no part in making.

Sometimes creative rounds make the work better. But an idea can also survive six internal rounds without becoming six rounds better. And at some point, feedback stops sharpening the work and starts documenting that everyone was invited to the meeting. And we ordered sushi!

I’ve watched ideas go through so many internal rounds they never got made at all. The discussions continued, the CMO changed, the mandate changed and the idea died. All that time. All those people. All that money. Not a thing made.

It’s death by discussion. I could say more about this, but I have a feeling you know what I mean, and this is already digging up past trauma.

Independent agencies have the most to gain by making a change deep within the process, not just in the output, and the most freedom to do so.

The expensive fight: an approved idea is not a production-ready idea

Once an idea has been sold through, everyone starts behaving as though the hard part is over. The client has bought it. The agency has defended it. The creative team has fought for it.

And by the time the director sees it, the idea has a deck labeled v22 FINAL, a budget problem and several emotional dependents.

But maybe the scene everyone loved on paper doesn’t work. Maybe the photographer sees something much better. Maybe the producer realizes the thing eating half the budget isn’t helping the idea — it’s drowning it.

You’re asking the people making the work to reverse-engineer months of choices they weren’t there to influence. What production sees as a suggestion, someone else remembers as the thing the CMO specifically loved. What the director sees as a fresh storyboard, everyone else sees as three months of their life.

That’s the expensive fight: the tension between what was approved and what is possible.

Producers should help shape the ambition, not just price it

A great producer knows the difference between spending money and putting money on screen. They know which “simple” request will quietly eat half the day, which expensive thing is worth every dollar and which assumption can be changed to unlock the whole production.

Too often we decide exactly what the idea is, then ask a producer what it costs. When the answer is uncomfortable, production becomes the department of bad news.

(Bad news: a rain rig costs money. Bad news: the live tiger carries some liability. Also bad news: if we talked about this a month ago, it would have been a quarter of the price it is today.)

But the best production solution isn’t always a cheaper way to make the approved idea. Sometimes it’s a better allocation of ambition. That’s why production should sometimes be involved as the brief is being written, not after the creative is finished or the night before a client presentation.

In the right hands, budget is also moving creative material.

The production system is now part of the creative idea

We’re not making three television commercials a year anymore. One campaign may need films, stills, verticals, cutdowns, social, product imagery and a library of assets that all need to feel like they came from the same world.

And that squeeze is only getting tighter: more deliverables, shorter timelines, same expectation that the work will still be worth watching.

Here’s one example of what it can look like when this goes well. On a recent global luxury travel project across nine destinations, the creative and production thinking happened together from Day 1.

That changed the questions we were asking: which stories deserved motion, which moments were stronger as stills, where local talent could make the work more efficient, what could happen simultaneously and what absolutely could not.

You cannot figure out the creative idea first and the production system second on something like that. The system is part of the idea. And sometimes the production system IS the idea.

Putting more into the work

Making has always been a part of thinking. Let’s treat it that way.

I’m not arguing that everybody needs to be involved earlier. Advertising does not have a shortage of people in rooms. But we deserve the right people around the problem while the problem is still interesting.

And earlier doesn’t mean free. Pay for a development day. Put a producer on the creative team briefing. Carve out a small fee to engage artists before the bid.

Spend a little while the idea can still change, watch the savings come back to you and watch your creative department evolve into more than dreamers with laptops.

Let a director hear the brief before receiving the solution. Let the DP help decide where the visual ambition belongs. Let artists influence the idea before everyone becomes afraid to touch it.

And hire a director who works with your creatives like they work with their own people. Learning how a director collaborates before production bidding starts is one of the biggest money-savers I’ve encountered in my career.

It also happens to suit independents: smaller agencies, artists and production companies can get the right people around the problem without waiting for the work to pass through six departments first.

So, I challenge independent agencies and brands to be the leaders in the new way to make. Not just for social, not just for one-off reels or that one stunt you want to win at Cannes — but as a new way for the system of the company to work smarter.

This is about using the whole budget, and all that creative talent, better.

And ultimately, to put more of the thinking, more of the money and more of the ambition where it belongs:

In the work.

Laura Wimer Jewell is an Executive Creative Director and Director with more than 20 years of experience developing ideas and making the work that brings them to life. She is the founder of Jewell Studio and ECD of Giant Originals, the creative studio from Giant Artists built to bring creative leadership, artists and production into the process earlier.

She has led work for brands including Netflix, BMW, Hilton, Virgin America, Alaska Airlines, Method and Dollar Shave Club. Her work has been recognized by Cannes Lions, The One Show, AICP, the Effies and The Webby Awards, and she was named to Adweek’s Creative 100.

She has served as a juror for The One Show, AICP, LeBook and The Webby Awards, and is a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.