Do you need a Fractional Chief Marketing Officer?

Creative Leadership.

Fractional CMO and Senior Marketing Direction, Delivered Properly.

At a certain stage of growth, marketing stops being a resourcing issue. It becomes a leadership issue.

You might already have a marketing manager, a capable internal designer and even an external agency. You might be producing campaigns and marketing materials are being updated. But nothing feels quite right.

What we see missing is consistent, senior-level creative direction tying everything together. Our Creative Leadership offer is a structured response to that gap.

It functions as a fractional CMO, but with extra secret sauce. We provide deep creative direction and the ability to deliver working solutions, not just commentary and strategy.

This be the verse:

  • The core philosophy of how we work is simple. Everything can be done better. (It’s what design is all about anyway).

    We apply that design thinking to how files are stored, how files are set up for each output intent, how studio job numbers run and are used, how traffic is managed, and how client emails & job tickets run. We apply it to everything.

  • We connect up practical day-to-day improvements with creative workflow issues. That’s a big part of the studio efficiency picture that is often missing. When is the last time you sat down with your staff and talked about the blockers to productivity?

    Some issues are mechanical and we've got buckets of practical tools and fixes for things like that.

    Tackling creative workflow issues that aren’t in software or hardware is harder. It requires a deep and practical understanding of how design & advertising studios work.

  • Creatives are complicated - they are smart, rambunctious, self-aware and often sensitive folks. Being able to truly see them, understand their frustrations, issues and things they are proud of helps us connect and communicate effectively.

    Rather than come in tell them how it's done, our first role is to see how they're working, what their pain points are. We don't make recommendations until we've listened first.

    At the end of a workshop session, we want your team to feel energised and hopeful. We want them to feel like they can do this.

  • The job of proper artwork setup is a can that is always kicked down the road for the last person to touch the file....

    Busy creatives might grab a placeholder asset or just screenshot some text from an online font foundry (but forget to note the font name) and any number of other little shorcuts to get the first draft out the door.

    It was fine for pitch, but it becomes a pressing issue and headache when you need to move into production or when you are on hard deadline.

    The real kicker is that issues like this tend to have a small but cumulative effect on the overall job efficiency. Each time the can is kicked down the road the job file gets a bit slower to work on. Rounds of changes take longer because of a creative or practical workflow issue that “I'll fix at the end”.

    We believe in, and teach the philosophy of stopping to sharpen the saw.

  • Once you have these issues identified you need an approachable, friendly and warm approach to connect and teach an alternative way.

    New ideas from a creative peer is always going to be an easier sell than a consultant that doesn’t understand the real world creative process.

    We’ll work with your team, either in all-hands training workshops, or one-on-one structured training sessions to get those persistent and difficult issues unpicked.

Design studio workflow issues eat margin, they make jobs move more slowly than they should, and they choke your studio throughput.

Tell me if this sounds familiar…

Things feel messy. Files are all over the place. It takes ages to onboard new creatives as they can’t got their head around your studio workflow.

You’re not alone. Creative folks usually excel at solving other peoples’ problems but sorting out our own issues is usually bottom of the list.

Paying attention to consistency on file management or any one of the jobs you know you need to do is a “nice to have” but not a “must have”. But what if you counted up the multiplier effect of seconds lost on studio tasks that add up to hours every week and days every month?

We get it. Entropy, deadlines and the general rot of busyness sets in. Before you know, it becomes a big task to sort studio basics across your team. You know there are issues but it’s not urgent so you’ll cope for a bit longer. I mean, you’ve got deadlines and who actually takes the time to sort this stuff out?

To answer that, what is the advice you’d give your clients? Would you encourage them to take the time to fix the margin eaters, or would you tell them to go down the path you’re currently on?

Incredibly
Experienced.

We’ve got experience working at every scale and in most creative roles. This means we get your studio needs.

We get
Creatives.

Getting in a purely IT based change consultant is a recipe for disaster. They don’t get creatives. We are creatives too, and we get it.

Super
Practical.

Many of the fixes and workflow tweaks that we suggest are easy to implement. They save time almost immediately.

Respect,
Earned.

We help other advertising studios and design firms and we share our tricks and tips generously because a rising tide floats all boats.

Forever
Curious.

We’re eternally curious and apply that to everything. Why is it like that? How does that work? Can we make it work better?

We Pay it Forward.

We’ve invested in the design community with hundreds of hours volunteering to make the creative industries better.

Let’s chat about doing things better.