Creative Input Options
Les Concept Development phase involves using the creative brief to guide generation of creative concept ideas, testing those ideas with the intended audience, and using their feedback to select a single creative concept. This iterative process of testing ideas involves incorporating feedback from the intended audience and retesting.
Creative Input Options
What are my options for creative input?
By the end of this step, you will have assessed your options for creative development (e.g., outsourcing to an advertising agency or keeping it in-house).
How to conduct this step and achieve its main objectives:
Understand the Different Approaches
Decision Point: Whether to Use a Creative Agency
You can develop creative concepts in-house with stakeholders, by soliciting advertising agencies via a request for proposal, or a hybrid of the two approaches. Depending on your context, you need to decide which approach will yield the best results.
- In-house co-design approach – Generating creative concepts can be challenging when working with a team of technical health programmers and other non-SBC professionals, but it may be the only choice if no advertising agencies meet your needs or budget. Be sure to balance the team with members experienced in SBC, including a facilitator with a solid foundation in SBC, and to invite freelance creative professionals, including but not limited to script writers, illustrators, and graphic designers. The facilitator’s role is to elicit high-quality ideas and ensure they are refined during the co-creation workshops to match the campaign’s SBC objectives.
- Advertising agency approach – Using advertising agencies to generate creative concepts usually results in more inventiveness than what can be achieved by working in-house only. A good advertising agency has a team of professionals, and you can engage in competitive bidding with multiple agencies to choose from multiple creative concept proposals. The quality of these proposals relies heavily on how well the agencies are briefed. Thus, inviting multiple agencies to the creative concept co-design workshop is essential so that they fully engage with the campaign objectives. Consider the contributions of each agency as part of the evaluation criteria when selecting the winning proposal. Also, be careful to modify the format for group presentations to prevent competing agencies from stealing ideas. You can also ensure stakeholder support by inviting them to evaluate the proposals and participate in discussions with the winning agency during the development process.
- Co-creation approach with a preferred advertising agency – If you already have an advertising agency engaged as a preferred vendor, the ideal approach would be to include the agency in the co-design workshops to ensure they fully understand the creative brief and participate in the concept generation activities. This cooperation ensures they can successfully build upon and enhance the ideas that come out of the workshop.
Request for Proposal
Suggested time:
4–6 hours
Participants:
Core design team; administration team; finance team
Example: Request for Proposal for an Advertising Agency
The request for proposal for an advertising or design agency can be adapted for your context. If there are limited advertising agencies in your area, you might consider opening the bid to regional vendors.
Effort required:
