Crafting Creative Content

Welcome back to Creative Compass! In our previous edition, we went through how to build your creative team for each stage of your growing business. It’s important to consider all factors and assets you have at your disposal, and ultimately you want to create a structure that puts out quality work at your goal quantity.

For this edition, we have quite the fun topic: crafting your creative content. Referencing the Creative Strategy Business Model Canvas, we’re covering the following sections:

1. Key Creative Assets

2. Key Creative Activities

I originally planned to include the next two segments of the CSBMC (Distribution Channels and Audience Engagement), but then the email would get cut off. Til next week.

🔑 Key Creative Assets

Key Creative Assets are the building blocks of your creative strategy. They're the tangible elements that communicate your brand message and value proposition to your audience.

Everything starts with brand—what makes you different from others in the market? What’s your unique perspective on the product, service, or the space in general? This is your starting point.

I don’t think you need a full brand book to get started, but you do need to have some codified document outlining this to you, your team, and your collaborators.

When you have a solid understanding of this, we can move on to the actual creative assets that you and your team will create.

It’s typically a mix of the following:

• Photos

  • Ecommerce Product Shots with white background

  • Stylized Product Shots with art directed background and/or models

  • Lifestyle Product Shots with a relevant setting as background, as part of evergreen content or campaign-specific content

• Videos

  • Stylized product video

  • Lifestyle product video

  • Product demo / taste test video

  • Brand story video

  • How-to video

  • User-Generated Content / Testimonial video

This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but it covers the foundation of the assets you should be thinking about. Overall, you need to lead your team and determine what all you need. Your core priority with this is understanding what content form factors (photo or video) best accomplish your goals.

Are you creating content for performance? For storytelling? For both? Proceed accordingly.

Content Examples

Take this photo example from Ash and Erie, a menswear brand I led growth marketing for:

We needed Valentine’s Day content and decided to tell a (fake) story of a couple. Ash and Erie is a clothing brand meant for men 5’8” and shorter, so our unique perspective was that shorter men can date taller women and look good while doing it.

I actually launched a really fun press stunt involving this exact narrative, which I’ll share in a future newsletter issue. I love press stunts.

Here’s a simple stylized video from Pizzafy, a sauce brand I helped launch:

The team wanted a simple video to soft launch the product and build hype. Since the brand and product were Airrack’s (Youtuber) brain child, it needed to be simple and speak for itself.

I shot this with his team where we took the sauce bottle, placed it on a ping pong racket, placed that on a skateboard wheel, and spun it around in front of a green screen.

You have to get really creative with production sometimes.

Here’s a video I produced for blip, one of the many sister brands of Starface:

We took to the street with a producer (me), videographer, and host to discuss vices (and virtues). This was meant for organic social, but stuff like this can easily be spliced together for ad creatives.

Like this ad shoot I produced for Unbound Snacks:

Managing Your Creative Assets

1. Asset Management System: Implement a digital asset management (DAM) system to organize, store, and easily retrieve your assets. I recommend Air (not a sponsor), but you can get pretty far with a mixture of Frame and Google Drive (I personally hate Dropbox).

2. Version Control: Maintain clear versioning for all assets to ensure the most up-to-date versions are always used. Please use clear naming conventions for your creative team. Ultimately, they’re the ones creating the file, but if you have a system for file naming it makes the entire process easier.

3. Asset Guidelines: Create comprehensive guidelines for the creation and use of assets to maintain brand consistency. I can’t tell you the number of revisions added for small logo tweaks, or caption font changes, etc—they add up. Pro tip: Have your editors edit within the User Interface of the social platform. TikTok and Instagram usually provide cheatsheets your editors can refer to. This ensures they don’t place captions or graphics that get covered up by comments, the description, etc.

4. Regular Audits: Conduct periodic audits of your assets to ensure they remain relevant and aligned with your brand strategy.

📹️ Key Creative Activities

This is my second favorite part of the entire CSBMC—what is our team doing to produce these assets?

Based on the above established asset needs, we’ll either need photos or videos. Planning these productions is the fun part, for me at least. Even working with UGC creators to develop these assets I find to be where the magic happens.

But before you start the production process, we need to establish one rule: Let creatives be creative.

Yes, we’ll have data to inform certain aspects of the produced assets. But something that AI and even the best systems will never replace is true creativity.

When you build a trusted team, which we discussed in the previous issue, you can give them creative freedom to try new things. You are the strategist, not the creative.

I have to remind myself of this often. There are times where you’ll need to direct and inform your team a bit, of course. But ultimately, you need to let them shine.

With that said, here are the Key Creative Activities:

Static Production:

Each type of static asset will require different production levels, for standard, white background e-commerce shots, you’ll just need the product, lighting, and a backdrop. Your photographer should be able to work with that.

Sometimes you might have campaign-specific photos you’d need, which you’d have to coordinate with a photographer, talent, producer, and maybe even a graphic designer (for end deliverables).

Your creative output will look similar to these:

Video Production:

These days, there are several core video assets brands are producing:

• Short-form Videos (Organic)

• Short-form Videos (Paid)

  • User-Generated Content (these are now typically scripted and acted)

  • Edits

• Brand Campaign Videos

• Commercials

Depending on the output you want, your production team can comprise of 1-3 team members. But, especially for brand campaign and commercial videos, the size of the team increases to potentially 10-20 per shoot.

I’d also recommend watching Grace Wells’ video here: https://www.instagram.com/p/DAw48wMsAqV/

It’s positioned towards creatives but provides a great breakdown of the video production ecosystem re: price points, team size, etc.

Here are a few examples of video output:

From left to right (click the links to view each ad):

1. 33mm

2. Opal

3. BILL

4. Chase for Business

📓 Wrapping Up…

The reason the CSBMC works as a whole is because each segment will influence another—case in point, Key Creative Activities influences Key Collaborations i.e. the structure of your creative team. We covered the team element first to give you a foundational picture of what and who is needed in the activities segment.

For most of us, we may not hold the decision power to structure the ideal team. The factors at play are budget, stage, and goal. Ultimately, this is a larger discussion for the executive team to understand what creative output makes sense in the short- to mid-term, and what the long-term structure should look like.

This decision-maker-level activity is always a work in progress, so unfortunately there’s no prescription that fits all sizes. (I hate when I mix up my idioms lol).

That said, I hope this was helpful and made you think more about how you would structure a team, task them with certain deliverables, and build a scalable creative workflow.

In our next lesson, we'll dive into the final pieces of the CSBMC: Distribution Channels and Audience Engagement.

A Message From The Writer

Edit: Wow, I’m already booked for Q4 😅. If you’re interested in chatting more about the following, we’re planning out 2025 and would love to see if we’re a fit for your needs.

Hey, I’m Leann. I’ve spent the last 5 years in the trenches of growth marketing and creative strategy.

I work with brands to craft campaigns that don’t just resonate—they convert.

I currently run TRIFECTA, a creative growth studio. We elevate consumer brands by combining the power of media, experiential marketing, and performance strategies. Our team is a collective of top-tier talent, from content creators and growth marketers to community builders, all working together to craft marketing that connects and converts.

I’m currently piloting a unique program where in just 3-6 months, I’ll embed directly into your marketing team and transform your performance creative department into a well-oiled machine. By the end of our time together, your team will be set up for long-term success, complete with a handpicked crew of creative talent—video editors, creators, and designers—plus an in-house creative strategist to keep everything running smoothly.

Ready to scale? Let’s make it happen.