How to judge creative
At Origin, we thrive on creative feedback. In fact, it’s essential to our process, because without it, we’d never truly know if our work is resonating with our clients, and we’d certainly never have the opportunity to elevate it to its full potential. We’ve always considered our clients to be collaborators, and nowhere is that more important than during the feedback process.
Like most creative endeavors, giving helpful feedback falls somewhere between an art and a science, which means there are few hard-and-fast rules to follow. Fortunately, there are proven methods for guiding feedback that will help ensure your creative team - whether in-house, or with an agency - has everything they need to deliver a final product that meets the needs of your brand, while capturing the minds and hearts of your audience. Read on to learn more.
The key to supplying actionable creative feedback is to evaluate it from multiple vantage points. That’s because there’s so much more to effective brand creative than pure entertainment value. Sure, it should be engaging, but it also needs to align with your brand’s essence, personality, and tone, and it definitely needs to satisfy the strategy outlined in the brief. Of course, it must convey essential key messages, while also abiding by the best practices of whichever channels or platforms your media plan calls for. Sound complicated? Well, it is… sort of.
At Origin, we’re big fans of the Head, Heart, Body method of evaluating creative output. We like it for four reasons: It’s simple, it’s memorable, it’s comprehensive, and it helps us understand which aspects of our creative are working, and which elements still need refinement. Here’s how it works.
Head
The Head part of this model focuses on the strategic and analytical aspects of creative. It’s where we ask the following questions: Are we communicating the right things? Are we reaching who we need to reach? Are we solving our problem, and also our audience’s problem? Does it feel aligned with our brand tone and essence?
When we’re considering feedback from the Head perspective, we’re always doing our best to ignore more subjective measures. We’re not considering whether or not we like it, nor are we thinking about whether or not it connects on an emotional level. Indeed, the goal is to entirely set aside any personal and/or emotional reactions, and consider purely based on its strategic merits. If that all sounds a bit cold and calculating, well, that’s exactly the intent. And don’t worry: There’s still ample opportunity to offer less cerebral feedback. In fact, that’s exactly what we’re looking for in the Heart phase.
Heart
Think about how you react to creative work: You probably aren’t immediately jumping to a comprehensive analysis of its purpose or intended audience, or trying to decide whether or not it solves a particular problem. Instead, you’re likely responding to how it makes you feel: Happy, sad, curious, indifferent, excited, and so on. This is Heart feedback, and it's generally the first feedback we receive, since most people react to creative just like you do.
While Heart feedback intentionally doesn’t incorporate strategic considerations, it’s critically important, because no amount of strategy can compensate for a lack of emotional connection. Good creative, no matter its purpose, always provokes a reaction, and connects on an emotional level. Heart feedback is rooted in those qualities, while also asking a simple question: Do you like it? Does it just feel right? Because until it does, it’s not ready for prime time.
Body
This is the easiest phase of feedback, because it doesn’t rely on subjective reactions, nor does it require a grasp of strategy or audience. Rather, Body feedback incorporates all the little (and not-so-little) nuts-and-bolts considerations that might seem relatively insignificant, but which can make or break a piece of creative. In the Body phase, we want to know about any typos. Have we misspelled a word, or used a font that’s not part of the brand identity? Have our colours been tested for accessibility? Is the body copy too long? Or too short?
Although we solicit Head, Heart, and Body feedback concurrently, Body feedback should be the final phase of evaluation, since it’s where we address the mechanics of creative that generally are not impacted by the concept or the creative execution of it. By waiting until we have both Head and Heart feedback incorporated and satisfied before addressing Body feedback, we are able to focus our attention where it belongs and ensure that the feedback/revision process remains as efficient as possible.
Conclusion
Being asked to share feedback on creative - whether it’s a logo, a concept, a campaign, a full identity, or just a social post - can feel overwhelming. Hopefully, the methodology we’ve outlined above will take some of the overwhelm out of the process, and ensure that your creative partners get the feedback they need to push your brands’ creative output to its full potential.
