If you are the proud owner of a leadership role at a marketing agency, you’ve likely realized, possibly much too late, that it’s way easier to have some smart person above you who tells you what to do than to be the smart person who has to tell other people what to do. At least most of the time.
But thanks to a fictional but-should-be-real evolutionary theory called Career Advancement To Make More Money—which states that eventually one must move out of one’s cramped apartment into a much less-cramped apartment, house, or condo, possibly buy an electric vehicle, and otherwise act like an adult—when opportunity arose, you snatched it up right quick.
So now you manage designers, writers, freelancers, various people with “Director” at the end of their title, clients (shudder), and perform a host of other busy-ing activities. Which is just fine, because it turns out you were born for this leadership stuff. We just know it.
The real problem is how to stay positive and maintain a healthy, happy workplace environment when creative projects collide with inefficient, ineffective, legacy marketing agency systems and processes. That’s right, marketing agency leadership is all well and good until:
- a lawyer points out that your current campaign violates a font’s End User License Agreement (EULA) 2,582 times
- finance asks you to quantify the value of creative assets (“Uhhhh…you want me to do what now?”)
- error-filled files cross the production finish line again…and again, and again…
Leading By Example Is A Real Thing
Ugh. It turns out that somehow, no matter what, your real job is to act cool, nonchalant, and ultimately stoic during a digital agency’s most stressful moments, because your people are always, always, looking to you to both know if everything’s okay and what to do next.
According to the American Psychological Association this is because of behavioral modeling, where humans learn not only by doing, but also by watching what other humans do. Which is where that whole “lead by example” phrase comes from. And why, in moments of duress, if you don’t let on that you're all stressed out and sweaty, they won’t get all stressed out and sweaty either.
That means anyone who has transitioned from an output-focused creative role to an input-focused leadership role needs quick access to the kind of information that gives them the confidence to make better decisions and project cool, nonchalant stoicism. When it comes to creative assets, this kind of information arrives when you can:
- track licenses to ensure compliance
- understand which assets are in use across campaigns, collateral, or clients to determine ROI based on spending detail
- use budgeting insights to guide current and future purchases
- dive deep into reporting and permissions to understand and control how teams use creative assets across projects
Take Their Word For It
We’ve got good news. Whatever your leadership role is at a digital marketing agency, the best way to stay positive yourself is to remove pain points from agency systems and processes in the first place. Kind of a “fix the illness, not the symptom” type-thing.
How do we know? We work with premier creative teams and organizations across the globe, and we hear a lot about the pain caused by archaic ways of tracking font licenses, uncertainty over creative asset value, and the fire drills that happen when teams try to verify the accuracy of fonts and other creative assets in the microseconds before they go into production.
That’s why this year we’ve introduced both license tracking to mitigate risk and usage reporting to quantify creative asset value. And why we’re building a platform (coming soon) where teams can accelerate their creative work process by quickly confirming and reporting that all creative assets utilized—including fonts—are error-free before the hand off to production.
Because having more perspective, insight, and control is the easiest way for our customers (ahem, that would be you) to both grow their businesses and maintain a positive, healthy, and happy workplace environment. And that matters to us. Big time.
You’re In Charge, And That’s A Good Thing
Sure, you may be where you are today because of the fictional evolutionary theory called Career Advancement To Make More Money. Or maybe not. Whatever the reason, the fact remains that leadership is a choice. No matter where you’ve been, or where you begin, you choose to lead simply because you think it’s important to do so. It probably stems from the fact people inherently look to you to both know if everything’s okay, and what to do next. Which is just fine, because you were born for this.
Want to know more of the things? We dedicated an entire YouTube channel to topics that matter to marketing agencies and their heroic creative staffs right here.
Hey! Thanks for being here. There’s a reason birds of a feather flock together, ya know?
www.extensis.com/connect/fonts
