Employer Insights Archives

Finding the sweet spot between valuing your work and striking a fair salary deal is a total game-changer for both job seekers and employers. Whether you’re a candidate aiming to earn what you’re truly worth or an employer seeking to optimize compensation and attract top talent, understanding the value of work is paramount. Here are our tips on how to secure a competitive salary that’s a win-win for both clients and candidates!

Step 1: Conduct Thorough Research

Before engaging in any salary negotiation, conducting thorough research is crucial. Explore industry-specific salary ranges, job market trends, and local economic factors. Resources like Creative Circle’s Salary Guide offer valuable insights tailored to the unique needs of both candidates and employers via a fully digital experience. This knowledge equips candidates with a clear understanding of their worth and helps employers make informed compensation decisions.

Step 2: Assess Your Unique Value Proposition

Candidates should assess their unique value proposition, considering their accomplishments, experience, and skills. By recognizing their strengths and the value they bring to the table, candidates can confidently articulate their worth during salary discussions. Employers, too, should assess the value candidates can add to their organization and ensure that their compensation decisions align with that value.

Step 3: Define an Equitable Salary Range

We all know that salary transparency is key to building trust between employers and their employees. Based on thorough research and self-assessment, candidates should determine a realistic salary range that reflects their value and aligns with their financial goals. This step is about assessing the value added by both candidates and employers, with the aim of establishing a fair compensation structure that recognizes a candidate’s worthwhile understanding of the employer’s budgetary considerations.

Step 4: Navigate Negotiations Confidently

Approach salary negotiations with confidence, understanding the importance of reaching a mutually beneficial agreement. Clearly articulate your skills, experience, and contributions, highlighting how they can benefit both candidates and employers. By engaging in open and constructive discussions, both parties can work towards a positive outcome that aligns with their respective goals and interests. Remember to stay focused on effectively communicating your value and advocating for what you believe is fair.

Mastering the art of valuing work and optimizing compensation benefits both candidates and employers alike. By following these steps, candidates can increase their chances of earning what they’re worth, while employers can attract top talent and make informed compensation decisions.

Remember, for candidates seeking to maximize their earning potential and employers aiming to optimize compensation decisions, Creative Circle’s Salary Guide offers valuable insights tailored to the unique needs of both candidates and employers. Gain hiring and career insights tailored to your role and unlock your full potential.

Explore the Salary Guide here.

Is the cover letter dead? Yes, no, maybe so! From hiring managers and HR professionals to candidates, we called for all the gripes, best tips, and positives about cover letters being on the decline. Here’s what they had to say about the dreaded cover letter. We wanna hear what you have to say, join in on the conversation here!

Thank you notes > cover letters.

Yes! Say it louder for the hiring professionals in the back!

A “portfolio” is worth a thousand words.

We (candidates) are begging, please listen to this!

This.

Creative briefs are the foundation of any good partnership. We’ve all seen briefs that are less than helpful, from vague descriptors to zero deadlines, briefs can cause all sorts of misalignments. We wrote all about the dos and don’ts of creative briefs here. But we wanted to ask our LinkedIn network what they can’t stand in creative briefs. Here’s what they had to say!

Clarity 👏 is 👏 key 👏

Make it make sense!!

This response makes us say wow!

Target Audience: Everyone.

Please ask yourself, do you really trust our judgment?

If you don’t know your audience, how will we know?!

Job ads can be just as telling as interviews. From tone to language, job ads can help you understand what the job culture and boundaries look like. From our Creative Circle audience to yours, here are the things you absolutely must know when applying for jobs. Save these job ad tips and your future self will surely thank you!

*GASP* The nerve of this client!

*Insert vague and generic job description here*

Make it make sense!

Salary transparency is a must!

We want a unicorn with ALL the skills but NONE of the pay 🙂

No one. Literally, no one likes surprises during interviews.

The creative brief is the holy grail of all sacred ad documents—it’s the foundation of any successful creative campaign, outlining the client’s vision, and strategic approach, ensuring everyone is on the same page.

A great creative brief outlines the problem to solve—and the path to get there—while giving your team the ingredients to do their most inspired work without prescribing the solution. As iconic architect David Rockwell says, “A great brief is an inspiring thought starter.”

What goes into a creative brief?

A creative brief outlines a campaign’s stated goals by defining the project’s scope, deadlines, deliverables, and demographics specific to the creative part of your project. It is equal parts inspiration and a helpful map to get a creative team on board with how to approach a campaign.

The goal? Get all the stakeholders—designers, copywriters, media planners, and more—aligned with key messaging and a strategic approach to executing a project successfully. Think of it as a one-stop shop for your project’s essential information, delivered in simple language that a designer, copywriter, developer, or another stakeholder can easily understand.

Why are creative briefs so essential?

You need a plan. A creative brief lets you articulate your vision and justify its benefits while sharing how you plan to target your audience. Simply put, a creative brief puts everyone on the same page before a project kicks off.

A well-crafted creative brief will also save you time (and money) because it is as much about aligning objectives as it is about anticipating obstacles. Better to get clear in the pre-planning stages of a campaign than further down the line. Here are some key reasons a great creative brief is so critical:

Gives your creative team a broad vision of the brand, business, and product.
Offers inspiration and a starting point for concepting.
Reduces client/creative conflict by getting all parties on the same page at the outset.
Aligns client budget and expectations with creative media strategy.
Clearly defines deliverables, deadlines, and checkpoints.
And last but not least, before they can sign off on a project, clients will expect to see a creative brief, and your creative team will need it before they can start working.

Who creates the creative brief?

In an ad agency environment, a strategist or planner crafts the creative brief, whereas, in other types of companies, it may be done by the account manager in close consultation with the client.

What goes into a creative brief?

It’s wise to include all that can help the creative team understand the vision and path forward, including:

A brief overview of the campaign’s purpose and objectives
Short brand statement
Key challenges the campaign aims to resolve
Target audience and demographics for the campaign
Primary message and rationale for the approach
Channels the campaign will run on
List of specific deliverables for the creative team
Deadlines and checkpoints

When all is said/done—the creative brief may not look like much; many are just two pages long, but the effort that goes into crafting this seemingly simple document is immense. Despite their importance, creative briefs are often poorly understood and not well-executed due to their open-ended nature. But we’re here to demystify this cornerstone document so your creative projects can get the solid backbone and structure they deserve.

Here are the 10 essential questions to answer to create an effective creative brief.

Covering these bases can be the difference between a struggling project and an incredibly effective one.

1. Why are we doing this project?

Context is critical for making great work—if your creative team is going to create anything exceptional, they need to know the ‘why.’

Why is the project necessary?
What need does it serve?
What do we want to achieve?
What is the opportunity—what is the challenge?

No need to delve into the historical nitty gritty; just stick to the salient information.

2. Who is the target audience?

You can only target your content if you’re sure for whom it’s being created. Make sure you know the ‘who’ of the project at the outset. Define who the desired end users are.

Where are they located?
What’s the target age?
What motivates this group?
What’s their socio-economic level?

Delineating this type of information can be the difference between a successful campaign and a big waste of time, money, and effort.

3. What is the core business objective?

Why are we creating this campaign? Is it to get more sign-ups via CRM? Is it to sell more sneakers? Or to ramp up engagement metrics? Define what success looks like—for a campaign to create value and be more than window dressing, but rather high-contributing parts of a larger strategy.

4. Who is the competition, and what are they doing?

After identifying your target audience, including information on the competitive landscape. Add links to review, along with any similar projects they’ve undertaken, and share relevant demographic details—where is there overlap, and where are there differences? Share what they did well and what could be done differently (and better) with your campaign.

5. Who are the stakeholders?

Address the ‘who’—but from the working side. You want to make sure everyone is clear on how the workflow flows. Who are the decision-makers on the client side? To whom should you go for approval on drafts?

6. What are the deliverables, and where will they be used?

Specificity is your friend. Be sure to list the main goal of the project—is it a print campaign? Commercial? Both? Then share what you plan to do with the creative so your team can deliver the right format in the right specs.

Where do you plan to use the creative?
In what formats do you need your campaign delivered? For example, if it’s a video, how many final versions are required, and how long should each version be?
If you plan to use the creative on social media, share which channels and the size and resolution specs for each.

7. What is the BIG idea?

If your campaign could be distilled into a few key messages—what would they be? What undergirding principle should the creative team keep coming back to that will help guide their efforts? Some agencies refer to this as the human purpose or big idea that will make the campaign resonate with the intended target audience. Done right, this can be a powerful guardrail for a creative project.

8. How do we want this campaign to look?

This section is where you paint, in broad strokes, what you want the campaign to look and feel like. Specify:

Tone
Color palette
Fonts
Logo specs
Any other guidelines related to the project

9. What are the deadlines?

The ‘when’ of the project is a point of critical alignment. Discuss timelines for feedback with the client so the creative team can stay on track with checkpoints and deadlines.

Defining these from the start will help mitigate delays and keep your project on track. While this is more a point for discussion than something always included in a brief, it is essential to list certain key milestones. Some important timings to confirm include:

When does the project start?
When are the final campaign deliverables due?
What are the milestone checkpoints?
How many cycles of revisions are budgeted?
How many iterations are expected, and when are they needed?

The campaign you’re creating ties into concrete launch dates—keeping all stakeholders on track can become a critical component of its success.  Some folks include a timeline in the brief, working backward from when the campaign or project needs to go live, which can look something like this:

Day 1: Kick-off meeting
Day 10: Final creative brief due
Day 30: Content due to client
Day 35: Content due back from client for team revisions
Day 42: Second review process
Day 47: Content due back from client for final team revisions
Day 54: Final Review Process

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Bottom Line

If you want to do exceptional work, you need a stellar creative brief outlining the problem to solve—and the path to solve it—while providing everyone with all the salient information to do their best work without telling the creative team how to do it. As the foundation of any successful campaign, the creative brief ensures everyone is on the same page and has a shared vision. And as they teach us from a young age: teamwork makes the dream work.

About the author.

An award-winning creator and digital health, wellness, and lifestyle content strategist—Karina writes, produces, and edits compelling content across multiple platforms—including articles, video, interactive tools, and documentary film. Her work has been featured on MSN Lifestyle, Apartment Therapy, Goop, Psycom, Yahoo News, Pregnancy & Newborn, Eat This Not That, thirdAGE, and Remedy Health Media digital properties and has spanned insight pieces on psychedelic toad medicine to forecasting the future of work to why sustainability needs to become more sustainable.

The buzz around ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) took flight on February 7, 2023, when OpenAI — an artificial intelligence research and deployment company — asked a limited number of people to test it. The initial reviews were rave, and by the end of March millions of people worldwide were using ChatGPT to create content. A student in the UK asked ChatGPT to write a letter to the city council protesting a parking ticket, and her fine was revoked. And this is just the beginning.

For the uninitiated, if there are any of you left out there, ChatGPT is one of the most popular and widely used large language models (LLMs) in circulation. ChatGPT can follow complex instructions given in spoken language and solve challenging problems accurately — imagine if Alexa or Siri could contribute to a creative process. Its capabilities are as astonishing as they are simple:

generate, edit, and revise in collaboration with users on creative/technical writing tasks, including songwriting and screenwriting
learn an individual user’s writing style
accept images for inputs and generate captions, classifications, and analyses
handle more than 25K words and support longform content creation, extended conversations, and document search/analysis.

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other tech companies have developed similar models. And AI is stretching far beyond just smart chatbots. There are already several iterations of:

text-to-image models that create realistic images from natural language
image captioning models that describe pictures with words
open-source applications that will classify and summarize text
vision libraries that enable computers to detect and track objects.

These tools have spurred a tremendous amount of both excitement and distress in the world of work. Will AI take our jobs? Make us more productive? Or a combination of both?

Let’s examine ChatGPT as it’s used in the advertising industry specifically for a closer look.

The Limitations of AI

From OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT: “While we have safeguards in place, the system may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information and produce offensive or biased content. It is not intended to give advice.” OpenAI admits to three core limitations of ChatGPT:

may occasionally generate incorrect information
may occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content
limited knowledge of world and events after 2021.

These limitations bespeak the need for human participation in any and every AI project. According to Todd Reinhart and Bill Skrief of AdAge, AI should streamline the human creative process, but it shouldn’t produce final deliverables:

“Just because a technology is in use doesn’t mean it’s ready for prime time. AI has been a media darling, but creative leaders need to look beyond the hype to determine if AI is right for their process and internal needs and if it synergizes with the comfort level and requirements of clients and partners.”

Reinhart and Skrief warn of the necessity to properly govern AI. Essentially, users must be fully aware and transparent about what it can and can’t do, as well as what it should and shouldn’t do.

For example, FreedomGPT is an LLM-based chatbot trained to have neither guardrails nor inhibitions. The tool was built by AI venture capital firm Age of AI and dispenses with most forms of censorship: it can explain how to build a bomb, it can use racial epithets and slurs and will, with the right input, happily praise Adolf Hitler. This has some unsettling implications. As recently as April, President Joe Biden told his council of science and technology advisors it remains to be seen if artificial intelligence is dangerous, but technology companies must ensure their products are safe.

Right now, ChatGPT is going through growing pains and working through a number of ethical and legal issues. It’s become apparent that human oversight is still required to recognize the technology’s potential for bias and toxicity.

How AI Can Help Ad Agencies

With only a few key phrases, ChatGPT can quickly generate multiple ad copy options. This can shorten the time usually devoted to brainstorming sessions or first drafts, giving copywriters and editors a head start. How simple is it? Ask ChatGPT, “write me ad copy for ______________.” So let it be written, so let it be done.

ChatGPT can also analyze consumer data and identify the most effective ways to reach specific consumer groups. The program can:

help advertisers determine the best social media platforms to use for their ad campaigns
determine the most effective times of day to target a particular market
generate new interests and audience groups.

ChatGPT can also conduct market research, another boon to ad agencies. This is immeasurably useful for advertisers looking to target consumer groups and/or specific demographics and discern their likes, their interests, and their overall buying personas. Some advertising experts even predict ChatGPT will eventually provide wireframes for the development and deployment of individual campaigns.

How AI Can’t Help Ad Agencies

AI is a good tool for generating new ideas and first drafts, but from there, think of it as a cake pulled from the oven: you still need a pâtissier to ice and slice it and put it in a display case (which said pâtissier has set at the perfect temperature and arranged alluringly, etc.). An application like ChatGPT can give you a good starting point, but it takes human creativity, experience, and imagination to create something wholly memorable.

“…at best, ChatGPT is a tool, a powerful one, that can save time and help creative talent focus on bigger thinking, but at worst, it’s a shortcut to mediocrity at scale,” says M.T. Fletcher of AdAge. “You don’t need a gizmo; you need an idea. You need an idea for a story, because stories are what people remember. Make your consumer the protagonist, your brand the catalyst, and tell a tale of transformation, redemption or discovery. From myths to memes, stories are what we share. And campaigns are never-ending stories. Which means creativity and non-linear thinking are still the most powerful tools in your arsenal.”

Example: AI in Action

As an example of ChatGPT’s capabilities and limitations, we asked it the question in the title of this article: “AI and Advertising: How Should Agencies Balance Smart Tech and Human Talent?” Here’s its verbatim answer:

“Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed the advertising industry, enabling advertisers to target specific audiences, optimize ad campaigns, and measure results with greater accuracy. However, despite the benefits of AI, it is important for advertising agencies to strike a balance between smart tech and human talent.

Here are some ways that agencies can balance AI and human talent in advertising:

Identify areas where AI can add value: Agencies should identify areas where AI can add value, such as targeting specific audiences, analyzing data, and optimizing ad campaigns. This will enable agencies to leverage AI to improve their advertising efforts while also allowing human talent to focus on more strategic and creative tasks.

Hire talent with the right skills: Agencies should hire talent with the right skills to work alongside AI technology. This includes individuals who have a deep understanding of AI, data analysis, and technology, as well as those with a strong creative skill set who can think outside the box.

Encourage collaboration: To strike a balance between AI and human talent, agencies should encourage collaboration between the two groups. This will enable team members to share knowledge and expertise, and to leverage each other’s strengths.

Emphasize the importance of creativity: While AI can help optimize ad campaigns, it cannot replace human creativity. Agencies should emphasize the importance of creativity in advertising and encourage their teams to think creatively and come up with innovative ideas that resonate with audiences.

Use data to inform decisions: AI can help agencies collect and analyze data, but it is important to remember that data is only one piece of the puzzle. Agencies should use data to inform their decisions, but also rely on the insights and expertise of human talent to make informed decisions.

In summary, advertising agencies should strike a balance between AI and human talent by identifying areas where AI can add value, hiring talent with the right skills, encouraging collaboration, emphasizing the importance of creativity, and using data to inform decisions. By doing so, agencies can leverage the benefits of AI while also leveraging the unique strengths of human talent.”

As you can see, it’s a great start, but it’s largely just a start. The article is grammatically sharp with solid pacing, syntax, and tone, but the content overall is very general and offers few unique insights that truly educate the reader.

How the Right People Can Put AI to Work for Your Agency

AI content will often be “pretty good,” and “pretty good” is impressive when produced with such ease and speed. But anyone in advertising, communications or marketing knows that “pretty good” isn’t enough, especially in an increasingly incredible competitive market during economic headwinds.

So will the phrase “flesh-and-blood” become the “bricks-and-mortar” of the ‘20s, a way to describe increasingly irrelevant human capital as AI continues producing more and better content? In short, no, it shouldn’t.

Replacing your copywriters, editors, and proofreaders with large language models, or your animators, graphic designers, and illustrators with text-to-image AI applications, is a recipe for disappointment and failure. If you put together an orchestra without a conductor or set sail without a captain, you’re sure to find yourself face to face with disaster. In other words, you can’t just leave AI to AI.

AI is likely to change how your agency works and how your talent spends their time. It can grant you efficiency and increased speed by enabling you to produce more content in shorter periods of time. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves — AI is not likely to outright replace employees en masse anytime soon. At least, not for smart agencies and forward-thinking talent.

Because AI is so accessible and affordable, it’s helping to establish a baseline of competency that every agency can easily reach. To stay competitive, it’s more important than ever to have the very best creative talent. Brands will need the writers, editors, project managers, analysts, and more who can write careful prompts, fact-check and edit AI output, fine-tune content for specific customers, propose novel approaches to common client challenges, delight audiences with original ideas and, perhaps most importantly, stay keenly aware of AI’s quickly evolving abilities and pitfalls.

Jobseekers who stubbornly stick to old methods may soon find themselves becoming more and more replaceable. But the open-minded creatives who are eager to learn new tools, adapt their processes, and consistently challenge conventional thinking are going to be the most impactful contributors that a company can have. This is the type of talent that successful agencies will be seeking out, developing, learning from, and utilizing in the years ahead, and it’s the type of talent we work with at Creative Circle.

Nothing brings a team together like making an idea come to life. But there’s a way to nurture and guide the journey so that the outcome is everything you want—or more. Feedback is a vital part of taking an idea from concept to finished product, and several best practices exist to make that happen successfully.

If you are the person managing the creatives, there are some things you can do at the outset of a project to put some guardrails in place and keep things running smoothly. Before a project kicks off, make sure that you and your creative team are aligned so that everyone is working towards the same goal.

To do that, outline the project’s scope, delineate the exact deliverables you need, and map out your timeline—the more clarity up front, the better.

Once the project has kicked off, communication is everything. And how you provide feedback can be the difference between success and failure.

Here are some tips for providing intelligent, respectful, and constructive feedback when collaborating with creatives.

ASK QUESTIONS—LOTS OF THEM

Asking the right questions is essential for sparking ideas. Especially if you are in the ideation phase of a project, it’s necessary to poke holes in ideas and to pressure-test the thinking behind concepts. It’s ok for ideas to fail. As the Silicon Valley maxim says: Fail often but fail fast. From technology to art to entertainment, great creators are the ones who take chances and question the way things are.

When your project is in motion, and you are reviewing work, asking questions is a great technique to ensure a collaborative conversation. Say you don’t like the hue of a muted mint green; instead of nixing it outright, ask your creative to talk about their color choice. A simple, open-ended question can be eye-opening. That muted mint that made you cringe may actually be trending and give your project some up-to-date cultural currency.

IDENTIFY PROBLEMS, NOT SOLUTIONS

Share your thoughts, but don’t tell creative precisely what to do. There’s a BIG difference between being specific versus coming up with the solution. Most creatives work best when they can maintain a sense of ownership of the work. Remember—this is their area of expertise. Trust that they know what they are doing, and they will likely come up with a better solution.

Yes, creatives have blind spots, but rather than rewrite or redesign something yourself, explain what you feel is not working. For example, don’t say, “make the logo bigger—instead, explain why you want it bigger. Is it hard to read? Is it getting lost on the page? Once you have identified what is not working about something, your designer may see a more elegant solution that involves shifting the color, placement, or injecting more white space. A problem-focused approach invites more fruitful collaboration.

START ON A POSITIVE NOTE

When giving feedback to a creative, start with what is working. Starting on a positive note helps frame the overall mindset of the meeting. Think: “This typeface is really working well,” or “I like your use of bold color,” or “Your intro sets up the piece very well.” And then move on to the parts of the project that are not working so well for you. Stay focused on the problem, and let the creative craft a solution. Remember, you hired them for their expertise, so give them a chance to take your notes and recraft the work with your feedback in mind.

BE HONEST. BE CLEAR. BE KIND.

Deliver feedback with honesty, sincerity, kindness, and, perhaps most importantly—respect. Emotions are part of the creative process; keeping the focus on the work in a mindful manner can help keep them from kicking into high gear. Some ways to do that include identifying what traits of the work are or are not feeding the end goal. Are there redundancies? If the copy is unclear, what would help clarify the message? Are there details that are off-strategy or don’t capture your brand’s personality? Saying you found something confusing is infinitely better than saying, “no one will ever understand this.” Speak to specifics. And as any therapist would recommend, avoid “you” or “I” statements and instead share what you feel is missing the mark. You can help keep things moving forward smoothly.

CONSOLIDATE FEEDBACK

There may be nothing worse for a creative than receiving a pile of feedback in disparate emails or calls from an entire team. Collaboration can birth better work, but a tangle of disparate feedback leads to chaos and confusion. Gather feedback only from relevant stakeholders.

If multiple people need to review and approve the final product, gather and consolidate your collected feedback in one document before sharing it with the creative. Live PDFs are a smart way to do this. Keep comments concise—and be mindful of nixing conflicting remarks and any other criticism that is not constructive. When delivering the feedback, think more bullet points and less long paragraphs. Make it easy for the creative to digest your comments and make necessary changes.

SET PARAMETERS AND HONOR BOUNDARIES

Craft a trusted creative partnership by managing expectations from the beginning. Set timelines for check-ins at the start of a project, with time scheduled for feedback at different points of the project. And when asked to provide feedback, do it in a timely fashion.

Agree ahead of time on how many rounds of revisions are included and try to stay within those bounds.

Aim to stick to the original scope of the agreed-upon project. If you decide midstream to expand beyond what you initially thought was needed, be prepared to offer proper compensation. Beware of scope creep that is not negotiated. Nothing sours a relationship with a creative person than uncompensated scope creep. If your needs expand or shift, chat with your creative and plot out a new, refined plan of attack. Your relationship and project will be all the better for it.

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Key Takeaway

Learning to give great constructive feedback is a valuable skill that will pay dividends. Some truly magical things can happen when all parties feel seen, heard, and respected. Improve your creative relationships by referencing these tips whenever embarking upon a new creative endeavor.

About the author.