Larry Miller article advertising agency in-house creative freelancer retail
Uh Oh!
There is often a
gulch, gully, gulf, gutter, gap, chasm, abyss




between retail culture and ad agency culture.
Your job is to build sales.
An extreme view perhaps:
The ad agency's job is to win awards.
Your job is to build in-store foot traffic now. Or its online equivalent.

The ad agency's job is to run long-term campaigns.
Your job is short– and long–term effectiveness.

The ad agency's job is creativity.
Your job is keeping them focused.

The ad agency's job is profitable repeatable media insertions.
Your job is profitable quarterly reports.
It could be even worse.
If you have both an ad agency and an in-house creative or desktop department, you also have problems that keep you from building sales.

Do agency and in-house duplicate each other‘s work?
Do they neutralize each other's work?
Do they try to share artwork and computer files?
Do they need separate, time–consuming meetings?
Is the agency going left while in-house goes right?

Life should be simpler.
Fees should be more manageable.
Advertising should be more effective.
Time should be saved.

Retailers know that image ads are no substitute for ads that build foot traffic
this weekend.
What an ad agency
should do:
Be retained for broadcast creative, radio, Web, and TV.
Or for major four-color work.
Or for online creative.
What freelancers
should do:
Be hired for special talents like photography, hand-lettering, illustration, typography, retouching, to fine-tune HTML. Or to fill in for a sick staffer and when there's a crunch.
What you the ad executive
should do:
Your real job.
Not have to coordinate meeting after meeting with agency, in-house creatives, freelancers.
Not have to hold their hands.
Not have to keep vendor siblings from sibling rivalry.
Not have to baby-sit creative egos.
A way to solve this problem.
Retain Listen, Write, Design, .
To coordinate your in-house creative staff.
To coordinate agency with in-house staff.
To coordinate both units with freelancers.
To coordinate them with your merch people.

Tough love and persistence, experience and persistence, mutual respect and persistence, fun and persistence, are our tools. (Plus a sense of humor, nuts and raisins.)

What makes us effective is, while our loyalty is with you, our emotional sympathies are with the creative people.
—They will sense it.
A mite mutinous, but we all end up the better for it.
Wouldn't that
make things easier
and more productive
for you?!?
To coordinate means
your creative groups share a common design language. They build on shared concepts. It means they work to meet common business goals. They share the same computer database of SKUs, prices, logos, photo scans, artwork, standing catalog copy. (Your in-house IT and Excel geniuses may need to help.)

To coordinate means
your ads, brochures, broadcast, Web — and people — all work together.

Fragmented they cripple your message.
Together they reinforce your message.
A turnkey creative solution.
On a part-time, consulting basis.
We coordinate it all.
We report to you.
Everyone else reports to us.
Simple.

We become your Consulting Creative Director.

Listen, Write, Design, makes sure creative work is high quality, designed to meet timely business objectives like weekend or holiday sales.

We may run the numbers to see if you are better off with staffers or freelancers. (Our CPA may powwow with your CPA.)

We may tie in to your in–house creatives via communication software that lets us work right on their screen, with them, from our office. Your ad agency also reports to us some of the time. (They won't always be cheerful about it but don't worry — we also value their focus on creativity.)

We make sure the work is properly prepared for printing so you don't get nasty last–minute surprises. We make sure it's properly proofread (many creatives don't know the difference between its and it's, between criterion and criteria, or where the period goes when you use parentheses near the end of a sentence).
It's a turnkey system. Clean. Efficient. Fun.

Contact:
Phone 704.542.3375