This document provides guidance on building an effective in-house creative services department. It discusses setting department objectives, organizing the department structure, determining required deliverables and talent, defining project types and timelines, setting performance metrics, implementing processes like creative briefs and workflows, utilizing project management and branding tools, and validating costs. The overall message is that with the right planning and coordination across marketing, a creative services department can efficiently and cost-effectively support all aspects of a brand's marketing needs.

1. How to Build a
Great In-House
Creative Services
Department
Let’s Go
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2. Bringing it all together
2
Marketing organizations are constantly challenged to keep all
the pieces of their brand glued together. From traditional
advertising, online, direct, to the next generation of social
media, brands have never been at greater risk of becoming
fragmented and diluted. With all the possibilities, building the
right creative team to support your marketing needs requires a
more nuanced approach than ever before.
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What’s Inside
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Department
Objectives
Organization
Deliverables &
Project Types
Accountability Process Tools
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Supporting Business Objectives
As a services-based department, it can be helpful to set
specific objectives just for the creative department —
even on top of overall marketing department objectives.
Creative teams often see themselves as a unique group
whose purpose is to use their skills to not only build
functional marketing materials but awesome creative
work. Having department-specific goals can help teams
connect with a purpose that is more in tune with their
creative aspirations and years of training.
For example:
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1. Take the mundane and make it interesting. Never settle for vanilla.
2. Produce beautiful and quality work within reasonable timeframes.
3. Good communication leads to better outcomes.
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Organizing a Department with Clear Intent
Like a well-designed room where all the pieces fit
together, a great creative services organization
compliments and supports the rest of the marketing
department and ultimately the brand.
In its ideal form, a creative services department should be built on
the core marketing needs of the company and be able to effectively
support all internal groups including: marketing, product teams,
sales, etc... (In fact, the sales team should LOVE the creative group.)
All departments should have access to well-defined and streamlined
processes to ensure business objectives are met and that projects are
produced on time. Creative teams should be happy in their jobs while
producing quality work that builds upon the company brand.
In addition, teams should be measuring their performance for
continued improvement that can validate department costs.
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Matching Deliverables and Talent
One of the most important first steps in having a
successful creative department is determining exactly
what kind of deliverables your creative team is
responsible for and what kind of skill-sets are required.
Right off the bat that seems like an easy question to answer, but it’s
surprisingly tricky to get right. Many teams are strong in design, but
not at conceptual thinking—or they are brilliant at producing collateral
but don’t understand how to optimize an email for lead generation.
Creative talent comes in a wide range of skill-sets. Knowing what the
differences are makes building your team around specific needs much
easier and sets the trajectory for long range success. After working
through this process, you should get a pretty good sense of what kind
of team you need to build, train or outsource.
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Department Organization
Departments come in all shapes and sizes. Good cataloguing
of project types makes it much easier to determine how to
retool a department or set up a fitness plan. It’s also key in
figuring out which mix of personnel is needed: ie: traditional,
direct, online, print production or fully integrated.
When hiring a designer, consider someone with multi-discipline
training around different mediums: print, online, and social.
Designers with a good foundation of skills can apply their talent to a
multiple of mediums, but should be able to articulate how concepts
are applied across a variety of mediums.
Typical gaps that are not covered in school, include: how to make a
well-designed PowerPoint presentation and understanding how to
provide value for sales teams (what they actually need, versus what
designers think they will, “like”).
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SR. DESIGNER
DESIGNERS
SR. COPYWRITER
COPYWRITER
WEB / UI DESIGNER
CREATIVE DIRECTOR
TRAFFIC MANAGER
LEAD-GEN / SALES
SPECIALIST

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Not All Projects Are Created Equal
Since projects vary in size and scope, and in order to get realistic
forecasts, it’s helpful to rank projects based on a sliding scale. For
example, a corporate event may take months to produce using all of
an Art Director’s time — whereas an email and landing page may
simply require dropping in copy. Projects can be defined as follows:
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Type 1: Large scale project - Over 100 hours
Staffing: Requires creative staff of 3 or more
Timeline: From project kickoff to completion takes a month or longer
Type 2: Medium project - 40 to 100 hours
Staffing: Requires creative staff of less than 3 or 50% of 2 staffers time
Timeline: From kickoff to completion takes less than 1 month
Type 3: Small creative or production project - 1 to 40 hours
Staffing: Requires a creative staff of 1–2
Timeline: Project could take anywhere from 2 hours to 1 week
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TYPE 1
TYPE 2
TYPE 3

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How to Set Performance Objectives
A creative department’s culture should allow for
defining success on multiple levels. One key
benchmark is determining the number of projects
that can be produced in a fiscal quarter.
Start by establishing a baseline for the number and type
of projects that were produced in the last 6 months.
If this has not been measured in the past, take your
best guess and start keeping track going forward.
This measurement can be used to set department goals,
reorganize teams and validate budgets.
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Number
of projects
In 2017
Project
Types
Average
by quarter
Number of
projects
in 2018
Change
Tier 1
Tier 2
Tier 3
36 9 42 +15%
424 106 454 +7%
6 1.5 7 +15%

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Creatives are Okay with Accountability
A typical marketing myth is that creative teams only want
to produce fun work for their portfolios and don’t care
about results. In fact, the opposite is true. Creative teams
like to measure their success. When a creative person
knows the work they produce yields tangible results and
is meeting program objectives, it’s quite gratifying.
When the creative goes wrong, it’s often because there is a lack of
clearly defined goals and objectives. The more focused the
objective, the better the creative result. The fuzzier the objective,
the worse the creative product and the more painful the process.
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NUMBER OF
PROJECTS PRODUCES
SHOW & TELL
SESSIONS
CREATIVE REVIEW
MEETINGS DEMAND-GEN
PERFORMANCE
RESULTS

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Bad Process Inhibits Good Work
Marketing is a complicated business. Even the most
experienced marketing professionals struggle with
basic processes and systems, wasting enormous
amounts of time and energy.
Of all the components at the start of a marketing project
nothing is more critical than the Creative Brief to get teams
moving in the same direction. At its best, the brief is a clear and
focused piece that guides projects from start to finish. It’s the
one salient document that all parties agree to, the information
kiosk, the project constitution, and the undisputed
representative of the brand positioning.
In conjunction with creative briefs it is essential to map project
workflows to manage expectation, keep projects on schedule
and set up teams for success. Workflows tend to work best
when made a simple as possible.
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CREATIVE BRIEF
QUICK PROJECT BRIEF
STANDARD PROJECT
WORKFLOWS
SHOW & TELL
SESSIONS

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The Right Tools Should Seem Easy to Use
Bringing all your marketing resources together means
having a tool or tools that allow for visibility and access to
the brand. This includes: identity materials, campaigns,
messaging, and strategy.
To date, few solutions have emerged that can meet everyone’s needs.
Third party solutions often fall short on perceived capabilities leaving
companies to build proprietary sites that require a significant
amount of resources to manage. When evaluating project
management solutions and brand management tools, consider
separating your mission critical needs from the “nice-to-have”
features. Most folks only use the basic functionality to access the
most common resources.
In addition to a quality project management tool, it’s very helpful to
have a well-organized resource library with both visuals and content,
as well as a standardized file naming convention.
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PROJECT MANAGEMENT TOOL
RESOURCE
LIBRARY
(visuals & messaging)
FILE NAMING
CONVENTION

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Validating Costs
Somewhere between trying to create great work and
running the department, you need to validate costs.
The creative services department can provide an
extraordinary amount of value, both from a marketing
and cost perspective. Being able to communicate that
value when budgets and head-count are being
scrutinized is important for maintaining harmony
with the CFO.
When a creative department is staffed correctly, it can be a huge
money saver for the company in comparison to being heavily
dependent on a decent advertising agency.
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Summary
Building a creative services department is no easy
task, but with the right motivation and plan, even
the most complex organizations can hum along
like a well-oiled machine.
Having a coordinated effort across all departments is the
only way for companies to be confident that their brand
can stay on track, demand-gen programs are successful
and valuable sales assets are created.
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Jon is a seasoned strategist and creative director who works on a range
of digital and traditional marketing experiences for both B2C & B2B
clients. Jon works with startups, Fortune 500 companies, internal
marketing organizations, agencies, and everything in-between.
Founded in 2013, Anderson Creative is a creative services boutique that fuses
lead-generation and brand together through smart and beautiful creative.
One of the benefits of being a group of industry vets is that we’ve
made plenty of mistakes - and we're more than happy to share and
teach others how to avoid them. We work with creative and
marketing departments, CMOs and creative directors to help them
organize their processes, fine tune their workflow, revamp creative briefs, build
their teams, or even hire agencies. Because, being a helpful partner is more than
just doing the work, it's about giving more of yourself than you expect in return.
Jon Anderson
Strategist & Creative Director
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