Why the right creative isn't always the biggest, boldest, or most award-worthy.
It’s easier than ever to make more creative.
It’s still as hard as ever to make the ✨right✨ creative.
And what is the "right" creative, you ask?
In my world, I’ll tell you what it is not: BIG IDEA, big concept, big budget creative. The Cannes Lions kind of creative. At least not yet. 😉
The "right" creative in my world is the unsexy creative. The creative that creative people don’t write LinkedIn posts about (unless you’re me, of course).
It’s hands dirty, deep in the soil kind of creative. Hundreds of decisions, thousands of little actions, cultivating and shaping what our brands can become. Something distinct and thriving. Unique and meaningful to the communities of parents we serve.
Give me a huge budget, and we’ll go to the moon together. We’ll make something spectacular. We might even win a Cannes Lion. But give me a tiny budget, and we’ll figure out how to put every dollar to work, mining unexpected places that can have an outsized impact.
Here are 5 recent learnings that have reinforced why judicious creative leadership matters.
🏆 The work no one applauds
Some of the most valuable creative our team makes will never win an award. The welcome flow. The PDPs. The packaging. We just spent 5 months on a trade show booth that was up for 3 days. Good use of our time? You bet. The value of something is the experience it creates, not its longevity.
📈 Brand right, channel right
If you know me, you know I always want the work to be beautiful. But not to a fault. We study performance creative as closely as we do our flagship site–testing, learning and iterating quickly. Often, it’s the most unexpected—and least sexy—work that delivers.
🧻 Amazon is the great equalizer
We plan shoots and creative with Amazon in mind, alongside our bespoke site experiences, knowing our product may end up in a consumer’s basket next to toilet paper and AA batteries. It’s critical that our brands show up just as well there as they do on our home turf.
🛑 Do not pass go
If one brand can borrow another's headline, product copy, influencers, or PDPs, we flag it early and ask if it’s truly a creative problem, or something that needs to be resolved at the strategy or product level. Until we can answer those questions, we do not spend another creative dollar.
🥕 It’s how you cut the carrot
Some of our biggest brand moments happen during shoot production and shape how we meet the consumer on an emotional level.
Film or digital.
Street, house or studio.
Lighting, movement, casting, styling.
One of my favorite sayings from my HelloFresh days was: "it's how you cut the carrot."
Consumers rarely notice any one decision.
But they do notice the feeling all of them create together.
Having a lot of money is fun.
But so is getting your hands dirty.
And for me, that’s where some of the most valuable creative learning happens.
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Agency Partners
Production: Numbered, Martin Silvestre https://numbered.com/
Branding: Outset, Linda Honan https://outset-la.com/
Copy: T Collective, Tricia Mirchandani https://www.withtcollective.com/
