Guest post from Nerissa Sardi, VP of Marketing at UBM TechWeb

Creativity is the lifeblood of good marketing. It spans across more than the design of an ad campaign or the look and feel of a website. The best creative is collaborative, strategic and integrated.

For traditional marketing and advertising agencies the collaborative process has always been very straightforward. Mad Men style boards were typically used to describe an idea and sketches were used to approximate the vision for the final design. All of this personal engagement between creative and business teams, and the ability to stand up in front of the client and pitch made for a dynamic and rich collaborative experience from which the best creative ideas sprung.

Today, the practice of creativity in mid- and large-sized companies has undergone massive change. Not only are many cross-functional marketing teams distributed (across the building, the country or the globe), but they have also shifted the way they create. No more white boards, post-its or napkins; the production of creative has gone wholly digital.

The digital revolution has certainly helped the creative trade become more efficient and offered more options and opportunities, and it has fostered the invention of end-user consumption models that enable new ways to consume information and ideas! But the digital age has also made challenges that can get in the way of a truly collaborative creative process.  In some cases, the reliance on digital communications and tools can strip away the very creativity needed to build something new and good. Sometimes, gathering dynamic input and the right feedback can become too difficult. Or the opposite can happen with some collaboration tools that allow for too much input or feedback. These issues all have the same ill effect – they squash creativity.

The secret then, is to help enterprise teams find ways to recreate the Mad Men style creative review cycle in the digital age. This requires careful management of both technology and teamwork to make sure there is no overemphasis on one or the other. Fostering dynamic story-telling and communication, along with streamlined workflows have the potential to generate far more creative ideas than ever possible. And the best creative ideas are what innovative companies are built on!

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