I used to make a big mistake.
Trying to do too much.
As a creative you get excited about every idea. You want to make as many of them as possible.
In my early career I remember a couple of campaigns that we pushed too much.
On one we created eight 10’ ads rather than one 30’. On another we spread ourselves across more channels than we should have… posters, press, digital, radio, social and ambient.
Both times the budget and production time was stretched way too thin.
The work wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great.
From that point on we made sure to be more focussed.
Really refining down to the best then crafting, crafting, crafting.
Fewer executions. But all much stronger.
We’d still find places to push the ideas and get some great extra bits out. But not to the detriment of the main work.
Those later campaigns were a big improvement on the ones that had gone before. And won a few awards.
It’s even more of a problem these days with the amount of shapes and channels that a campaign has to fit into.
9:16, 16:9, 1:1, 4:5, leaderboard, skyscraper, print, digital, moving image, events, social, content across Month 1, Month 2, Month 3…
Of course, you have to make sure every execution is doing the job it needs to do well but without unlimited time and budget it’s impossible to make them all world-beaters. And they don’t all need to be.
If you spend some time making sure you’re focussing your attention in the right places then your work will be much better and much more effective.
Stay tuned to continue reading about my past mistakes.
