Stories of a Creative Project by Aleksander Kowalczyk - HTML preview

The Challenge: Go Public Before Spring

Monica has just started negotiations with the customer. She prepared a great brief proposing how this marketing project should look like. She included the ideas how to make the campaign laser-focused and not to loose  millions on prime time ads.

Monica proposed to focus on: LinkedIn, hard copy  business magazines and  on   sending bunch of CEO-only discount coupons to  selected CEOs who can forward them to  their business partners. Also included ads in a few  fashion and lifestyle magazines  that  are read by office assistants,  who often have a great influence on the place where their bosses eat  lunches. She  was   well prepared, she  had  optimistic approach and a lot of enthusiasm! She invited Olivier and his team for the presentation.

And the meeting became a  disaster. She presented all the ideas listed in the  brief. Bullet after bullet. Olivier put Monica through the hoops asking about subtle details of every single step in the  campaign: dependencies, effort   required and costs. She  has  not  been prepared for  such  a   detailed conversation and  she  had  a feeling that  the   customer’s hidden agenda is to depreciate the  value of the campaign or herself personally.

Finally Olivier expressed his doubts whether the campaign will  achieve the goals as expected. He underlined the tight timeframe, as people are  motivated to eat healthy when first sunny  days   come.  So it is important to go public before spring begins.

The Problem: Sense of Security

The   customer was  reluctant to  the  campaign proposal, because Monica hadn't ensure his sense of security.  The skepticism  resulted  from    missing  important  piece:  the schedule clearly shows the ownership of each step.

Olivier was afraid that  his small marketing team  will not manage to perform the campaign in such a short time, while in fact Sophie assumed (but not stated clearly enough!) that most of the work will be done on her  side.

Not  having all the data, Olivier thought that this campaign schedule might be too ambitious. He realized that the project can become a constant death march and can miss the goal to start promotion of his slow food  restaurants on the spring solstice.

The Lesson Learnt

Once  you   have  your  project plan ready,  you   need to communicate with the customer. Of course you can use a spreadsheet or a to-do list, but the best way is to  plan the project with an appropriate project management software.

Then  you are  supposed <