We love people and techniques that put numbers around things that are typically seen as unquantifiable. So we were delighted to discover a recent article in Martech Zone that lays out a compelling and valuable approach to the measurement of creative work.
“How A Creative Team Built an Executive Scorecard To Demonstrate Their Value To The C-Suite” by Molly Clark, Director of Marketing at inMotionNow, reports on the work of Cherise Oleson, the senior creative director at Franklin Energy. It is such a powerful way to use data to organize and report on creative work that we’ve given it our Measurement Maven of the Month Award.
This common sense advice on putting numbers around what creative types do is really smart. It demystifies some of the aspects of creative work, and it provides a template for communicating about that work in language that leadership can understand. It helps leadership take responsibility for their own role in the process as well.
If you don’t have a creative dashboard yet, Oleson’s approach is a great place to start. Of course we would strongly recommend that you add an efficiency metric or three to the calculations, so you know the costs of projects to date, whether you are on target or off, and which programs yield the best results for the least total resources. You might use something like this very low-tech chart (and I’m guessing your creative team might be able to do a bit better):
Big congrats to Cherise Oleson and her Franklin Energy creative team for putting this scorecard together, and to Molly Clark and Martech Zone for bringing it to our attention. A very well-deserved Measurement Maven of the Month Award to you! ∞
