Creatives and the business people often find it hard to communicate well on a project. This is mainly because of information asymmetries.
Informational asymmetries are when one person has more information than another about something.
Creatives know all about creative. Business people know all about the business needs of the project.
In a perfect world, they can both share all that information related to the project with each other. But in reality that can be hard.
Giving the creative all the business information usually is not possible or sensible – it would take too much of everyone’s time and result in giving the creative a lot of information that is not relevant to them.
And giving the information only the information they need is hard. Because the businessperson will not usually know the details of the creative’s process – and so not be able to work out exactly which information they need. Similarly, the creative does not know all the information available relevant to that business – so will find it hard to ask for everything they need.
Either side could potentially figure this out by spending enough time on the other’s work for that project. But then you might as well have one person doing everything rather than a team.
To help with this, creative directors can create information requirement checklists for “types” of brief related to a certain business project. For example in an advertising agency, a new branding exercise would be a “type” of project – for which there is a checklist.
This does not fully solve the difficulties that arise. But it reduces them by a lot.
