You’re a business person, not a patron of the arts.
When your creative team designs something, the results aren’t supposed to just sit around looking pretty. They are theoretically supposed to earn money, by:
generating more sales or impacting core company metrics
increasing positive brand sentiment
increasing sign-ups, conversions or engagement
Right?
But setting goals for creative teams that support both aesthetic and business goals in a measurable way can often cause LOTS of stress.
Creative work, for all that we’ve learned about harnessing it to benefit business goals, is still based on workplace creativity - something which is inherently a “fragile flower” unless actively supported. And for many creatives, sales targets do not provide the fuel from which to come up with great solutions to business problems.
This is sort of a thorny topic in the design industry, and because I also felt that the solutions haven’t necessarily been discussed enough in the community, I thought it might be time to investigate.
For this article, I posed the question to experienced friends and colleagues: “What are your tips and best practices for setting goals when it comes to creative projects or creative teams?” This article is meant to open up a discussion about some of the solutions.
Don’t confuse your creative goal with your key results
Many companies in the tech sector - and beyond - now use Google and Intel’s OKR methodology as their standard way of aligning an organization in working toward growth and accomplishing measurable success. In this system, a team or company will agree on:
O - an objective: an aspirational and qualitative goal (e.g. customers will consistently find our product useful)
KR - a key result: a measurable performance indicator of how well or poorly the goal has been met (e.g. churn rate is < 2% this quarter)
OKR methodology has been a breakthrough over the last decade for many companies that previously worked on “task-based” goal setting, which didn’t align people around common aspirations and kept them locked into processes that didn’t reward meaningful impact over time. However, setting OKR’s (and business goals in general) STILL can amount to a minefield.
In my experience, most problems with creative goal setting that I have seen happen when the goal (which should be lofty, and interesting) gets confused or conflated with the KR (the performance indicator).
Bad example: A direct-to-consumer beauty brand wants to launch a new campaign for sun care products this summer. They have an in-house marketing design team, to whom they give the brief for the campaign. The objective on the brief says: “Our aim is to create a marketing effort that will lead to twice the exposure as last year’s summer campaign and 30% more revenue generated in sales as a result.”
Hmmm. That seems like a goal for a different department, or perhaps the creative team’s KRs, rather than their objective.
Good example: consider Wix’s 2021 superbowl ad and the campaign that ran before it. The results showed that it was incredibly successful in reach, watch time and exposure, but those were the things that were measured after it was released. What were the creative goals?
As described by Wix’s CMO, the objective was to portray small business owners as the real heroes of the Wix story and of the 2020 pandemic. Beautifully amorphous, with core values and emotion expressed at the heart, not a number to be seen.
Think carefully about how you will measure your results
Creative outcomes are both notoriously unpredictable and prone to disagreements or subjectivity about how to measure success, making it really hard to create KRs for creative teams.
For example, how do you measure a “sleeker look”?
Some things are not measurable and measuring them is a delusion - but a surprisingly large number of things around creative work are actually measurable, as long as you keep the following points in mind:
In most types of design, whether branding, product design, advertising, marketing etc., optimizing for experiences works better than optimizing for looks. When you optimize for an experience, you create opportunities to uncover lots of touchpoints where customer behavior will become measurable.
Recognize what can realistically be measured quantitatively and what needs qualitative methods to uncover success/failure.
Check regularly to see that the metric you chose to measure is actually valuable (i.e. that it does indicate the type of success you want to see, or is as close a proxy as possible, rather than a vanity metric or one that can be abused).
Let business goals guide your decision of how to measure, but don’t let them dictate it.
Bad example: “We feel that our current website design might not be ideal. It seems outdated and not in line with what we want our new brand messaging to be. We’ll do a revamp of its UI and copy. When it rolls out, we will want to see a 30% increase in brand loyalty from our current customers.”
Yikes. It seems that the goal is to make the website less outdated, but then it also seems like the goal is to increase loyalty? Which of these are you measuring? And either way, there isn’t a clear statement here about how you’d choose to measure them. You’re likely to be pouring money and time into this effort without a clear way to know if you’ve succeeded.
Good example: “We know that users consistently complain about our UX in-app store reviews. Our aim is to produce measurably better UX design, so we commit this quarter to doing usability interviews with 3 users per week. We’ll measure the time it takes them to complete tasks in our interface, and we want to see time and error rates decrease by 20%.”
This is good because there is a clear and logical path from problem > goal > solution > metrics that indicate the solution works.
Measure results you can control
Understand your locus of control or sphere of influence toward reaching the goal. What are the resources you have to work with? What are the levers you can pull?
If you cannot identify a controllable lever that has the potential to lead directly to the result (i.e. it will influence a lead metric), any KR is going to be relying significantly on luck or, at best, on the hope that you’ll inspire some kind of domino effect.
Bad example: consider a media site with the goal of bringing in more revenue. A worthy goal for any company, right?
But they choose an objective for the creative team of bringing in 20% more revenue by the end of Q2.
This is less than ideal simply because there is no lead metric. The team has an undiscussed assumption that the 20% revenue increase will be related to some unknown lead metric, or that revenue IS the lead metric because it is directly controllable (we wish!). To make this work, the company needs to zoom in and get more specific on what creative change they think has the potential to increase revenue. Then they can create a realistic KR.
Good example: the aforementioned media site sets a goal of bringing in more ad revenue to their site without hurting customer experience.
They choose to redesign the site to host 20% more ads on each page, which should bring 20% more revenue. However, they simultaneously have a KR that the average reader’s time on site does not change. This will show that they don’t mind the extra ads.
These are an ideal goal and KRs for creatives for a number of reasons:
they relate directly to the business goal (i.e. more revenue)
the business hypothesis is baked in and explicit (i.e. more ads on the page will bring in more revenue, provided it doesn’t drive away readers)
the lead metric (i.e. how many ads we can fit onto the page) is a true lever: it puts controllable action into the hands of the people executing
the lag metrics can be measured as well (i.e. hurting readership can be measured over the long term by a decrease in DAU, etc.)
Be aware of how the goal and measurement results will influence the behavior of your creative team
Imagine a teacher telling his high school class that their report card grades will be primarily dependent on how they do on the final test.
Now imagine that teacher telling the same class that their report card grades will be primarily dependent on their class participation.
Are you going to see starkly different behaviors over the course of the year in one situation vs. the other?
You betcha.
Your creative team is no different. If you emphasize reaching specific numerical results, you will inspire different behavior than if you emphasize reaching qualitatively more imaginative or off-the-beaten-track ideas.
Additionally, the best goals relate closely to why we show up at work every day, and touch on our core motivators for us to do a great job. If the objective and its KRs do not take into account the reasons behind why creatives like doing their jobs, or why they like being a part of their team, or even just the team’s sense of what they find valuable in their day to day - it won’t properly motivate or align people to accomplish things.
Be honest about what behaviors you want to encourage in the team, and what behaviors your metrics will encourage.
Bad example: you’re a marketer leading a small team of freelance illustrators who will be creating artwork for performance ads for your product, which is an app. Your illustrators really value the quantity and variety of their creative output and get most excited when they’re working on generating creative ideas at full tilt.
The company goal is to improve the appeal of your app for your target market. The company plans to do this by building in more immediate value for them and by realigning marketing around the new value. Your KR as a marketer relates to the success of the marketing efforts: that you see downloads of our app increase this quarter by 20%. Figuring that since you’re all in this together for the goal of increasing product appeal, you give your illustrators the same KR.
This is bad because your illustrators value their imagination and ability to create new, compelling designs. If you focus on a dry, numeric KR and base your evaluation of their work based on that, you will very quickly de-motivate them.
Additionally, it’s questionable how much your illustrators can directly impact the downloads so you may be holding your illustrators responsible for a domino effect, and not for a lever that’s under their control.
Good example: you’re the same marketer.
Your goal is the same: increasing product appeal for your target audience. But you want to set a KR that ties in to your design team’s values while staying relevant to your goal.
You decide on the KR of doubling the number of ad graphics and mini-videos you publish per week on Tiktok and Facebook.
This is a great KR, because:
This is totally in line with your team’s motivating values: you’ll be pushing out lots of interesting cool and quirky ideas around the new marketing themes, without spending a lot of time polishing each one so it’s perfect.
There are directly controllable levers for these results: for example, your team can increase their creative output speed (and therefore quantity) by coming up with 30 ideas per day for ad graphics with brainstorming, paper sketching in groups, and other fun activities to get the creative juices flowing.
There is still a strong connection to the impact of your download goals: by doubling the number of ad graphics and mini-videos you publish weekly, you have more chance of getting to some super-high-performing ones.
Be clear about expectations… and boundaries
Discuss up front the different ways you feel are possible to accomplish the goal, rather than leaving this completely open. Fuzziness about execution can lead to misunderstandings down the line. If you want more website conversions, and are open to graphic changes but NOT content changes, say so at the outset!
Use creative briefs to guide and give inspiration. Anyone in the advertising industry will tell you that the best briefs are the most adventurous ones. A good creative brief leaves room for creatives to get messy and try new things. Even though the goal itself might not be measurable (e.g. a sleeker brand look), you can still lay out some possible KR’s for the work, as a hypothesis for what would happen when you release it.
Keep ahold of realistic deadlines - that everyone who needs to execute can get on board with and progress can be reported on regularly (i.e. weekly or monthly). Set clear time limits for completion and then check in from time to time rather than “hovering” each day to make sure things get done, as this is detrimental to creative work.
Bad example: “We want to update our entire user experience ASAP so that our product will be more appealing.”
OK…. How would you know it’s more appealing, and to whom? What’s your timeframe for execution? And most importantly - what’s inspiring about any of this?
Good example: “This quarter we want to show our customers just how much we appreciate their support during tough times. We’ll also want to update all our photography, illustrations, graphics, and copy so that it speaks clearly to the reasons they have been loyal to us. We won’t be building any new features or functionality as part of this effort, since it's out of the time scope. At the end of the quarter we’ll run 2 focus groups to get sentiment and feedback about our work.” This clearly answers the questions of what, why, how, when and how to measure.
Want to put this into practice in your creative goal setting? Without further ado, here is your:
TEMPLATE TO USE WHEN GOAL-SETTING FOR CREATIVES :
I’m grateful to everyone who shared ideas and contributed perspectives for this article. For confidentiality, I did not include any specific metrics, names and companies since goal setting is often an important part of a company’s IP.