By Chip Culpepper, Chief Creative Officer
Brand building has always been about consistency of message. Never has there been a better time to leverage that overall consistency than today. The applied discipline and approach of including TraDigital™ creative into the mix is often an overlooked piece of that puzzle.
The hurdle, it seems, often faces both traditional advertising “creatives” as well as their digitally inclined brethren. Writers, designers and producers of all sorts tended to be specialists in a single area in the past. Those creatives who embrace the ways of omnichannel distribution – even “media agnostic” thinking – to attack their clients’ marketing challenges and who commit to a TraDigital™ creative approach are not exactly unicorns anymore, but the value they provide is nothing less than magical.
We’ve called TraDigital™ an “art and science” of blending traditional and digital thinking and approaches in marketing communications. Our creative staff embodies that definition – particularly the “art” portion of it.
Creativity applied across platforms wins the day. Consistent creativity applied across platforms wins customers in the longer term. Simply put, our goal as practitioners of applied creativity for our clients is to build up their brands over time while simultaneously gaining traction on shorter-term objectives (monthly sales, traffic increases, special offers, etc.).
It’s not easy to develop a creative platform – a campaign – that works equally well across all media. It requires teamwork. It requires discipline. It takes an abundance of ideas and the honesty to evaluate those ideas to winnow out the ones that work well and those that don’t. It also takes a commitment to re-evaluate and rethink if something that “was working” stops working as well. That is a real difference in the TraDigital™ creative model. Real feedback comes back all the time. Performance is measured in minutes rather than months.
Being creative has always been a question of how well-informed and how attention-getting can those messages we bring to bear for our clients truly be. That evaluation is still relevant and is perhaps more so than ever. Now, with the immediacy of measurement across multiple channels, as creatives, we find out – and must refine – more quickly than ever before. Messages have to be “stickier,” more personal, more relatable, more action-oriented than their predecessor messages were. Keeping a TraDigital™ mindset pushes us forward into those considerations every day.
