The Business of Creative Strategy

I dropped out of college after my freshman year. I thought I got everything I needed out of my college experience—that I was ready to enter the business world.

I wasn’t wrong. I only needed to know enough to be ‘dangerous.’

Truth is, I got lucky. I was one of the only freshman to be accepted into the prestigious Entrepreneurs Leadership Program—the University of Michigan’s initiative designed to train the next generation of leaders and innovators.

One of the lessons they drilled was the Business Model Canvas.

In short, the BMC is a strategy framework meant to gut check your business idea. It's a visual tool that helps you deconstruct and understand the core elements that drive your business forward, providing a clear roadmap to validate and refine your idea before diving deeper into execution.

It breaks down a business model into nine key components:

1. Customer Segments: Defines the different groups of people or organizations a business aims to reach and serve.

2. Value Propositions: Describes the unique value or solution a business offers to its customers.

3. Channels: Outlines the ways in which a company delivers its value proposition to its customer segments.

4. Customer Relationships: Explains the type of relationship a company establishes with its customers.

5. Revenue Streams: Identifies how the business earns revenue from each customer segment.

6. Key Resources: Lists the most important assets required to make the business model work.

7. Key Activities: Highlights the critical actions a company must take to operate successfully.

8. Key Partnerships: Identifies external companies or entities that are essential to the business’s success.

9. Cost Structure: Details the costs involved in operating the business model.

Understanding this concept gave me a leg up in my early career. I ‘get it.’ When I talk to new founders, potential clients, or colleagues, I ‘get’ them.

This framework has allowed me to simplify business strategy—it gets us from zero to one without a comprehensive business plan. We can just execute.

The same goes for creative strategy.

I was missing a framework like this when I would build creative ops for my clients.

So I made a new one.

If you aren’t subscribed yet, I suggest you do. I’ll be breaking down this new model in-depth over the next few issues.

The Creative Strategy Business Model Canvas

It’s pretty straightforward.

1. Audience Segments: Identify and categorize different audience segments that the performance creative is targeting, including demographics, psychographics, and behaviors.

2. Creative Value Propositions: Outline the key messages, emotional triggers, and unique selling points that the creative seeks to convey to the audience segments.

3. Distribution Channels: Determine the platforms, media, and methods used to deliver the creative content to the audience segments, such as social media, email, and paid ads.

4. Audience Engagement: Define how the creative will interact with and engage the audience, including tactics for community building, encouraging user-generated content, and ongoing interaction strategies.

5. Success Metrics: Identify the KPIs and success metrics used to measure the effectiveness of the creative, including CTR, conversion rate, engagement rate, and ROI.

6. Key Creative Assets: List the essential creative assets needed for the campaign, such as visuals, copy, talent, tools, and software.

7. Key Creative Activities: Outline the key activities required to create, produce, and distribute the creative content, including brainstorming sessions, content creation, testing, and iteration.

8. Key Collaborations: Identify the key collaborators and partners involved in the creative process, such as influencers, agencies, production teams, and platform partnerships.

9. Budget Allocation: Detail the budget allocation for the creative process, including costs for production, media buying, talent, and tools.

Hit the Reply button below if you want a high res version of this framework.

Filling out this template might come easy to some of you, but for the rest, that’s what this newsletter is for.

Over the next several newsletter issues, we’ll cover these sections in-depth. We’ll spend more time on certain sections that deserve it.

For example, Audience Segments will cover emotional triggers, uncovering customer Jobs to be Done, how you validate what customers buy your product, etc. Other sections, such as Success Metrics, are a bit more straightforward. Performance Creative is meant to convert. Plain and simple.

My goal with this newsletter is to help you set up and scale an efficient Creative Strategy org. I want to turn your company into a creative output machine—for both paid and organic social.

Whether you're just starting out or looking to optimize an existing process, there's something here for everyone.

If you have specific topics or challenges you'd like me to address, feel free to reply to this email or reach out on social. I want this to be as interactive and valuable as possible for you.

Thanks for reading.

A quick note on the future of this newsletter:

In future editions, we’ll mix it up. Some issues will be like this one—deep dives into creative strategy. Others, like next week’s, will be round-ups. And sometimes, we’ll feature interviews with top creatives and marketers.

But no matter the format, one thing stays the same—this newsletter will make you better at creative strategy and a smarter marketer.

I guarantee you’ll learn something new with each issue. If you don’t, feel free to send me some hate mail. I dare you.

See you next week.