Advertising Design: Planning For Success



Posted: Friday, March 04, 2011

by Howard Theriot
Catch Light Productions

This is the first in a five part series to help you, as a marketer, get the most from your design and advertising projects. The following information, advice, and tips are compiled from 22 years experience dealing with the best and worst habits of a wide variety of clients on an even wider variety of projects.

Getting started on your next marketing project shouldn’t mean staring at a blank page wondering where to start. It also shouldn’t mean jumping on the latest hot trend — you don’t need to be on Facebook if it doesn’t fit into a real strategy. Smart marketers do their homework and create a strategic plan. This means developing a strategy for the project at hand that meshes with the strategy of your brand overall. It’s all about research and decisions and it’s far too much to cover here. We strongly recommend the Principles of Marketing Tutorials from KnowThis.com [http://www.knowthis.com/principles-of-marketing-tutorials/] to get you off on the right foot.

Once all the legwork is done, you'll be in a position to determine a realistic budget that covers all of the following project phases…

Next, you should plot a timeline for getting things done and be prepared to stick to it. Including reasonable time for all of the above phases will save you from unnecessary rush charges and the risk missing deadlines — media deadlines often do not budge and missing them can be costly. Even being generally unorganized will likely create the need for additional administrative tasks, resulting in additional billable time and delays in production. Smart time management goes hand-in-hand with smart planning.

Finally, you need to put the general scope of your project on paper. Using our Creative Work Plan [https://www.catchlight.com/images/stories/doc_files/creative_work_plan.zip] is a great way to point your project in the right direction from the get-go. This worksheet will force you to focus on substance and avoid the pitfalls of thinking in terms of colors and fonts.

That’s the planning stage in a nutshell: Doing research & making decisions, allocating time & money, and planning for creative execution will ensure you start your project well armed and ready to conquer.

Our next article will cover project workflow — specifically the Critical Path.
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