You're faced with multiple creative projects. How do you choose the ones that align with your business goals?

To ensure that your creative efforts are aligned with your strategic goals, it's important to evaluate each project's contribution to key objectives like market share, customer satisfaction, or innovation. Consider creating a visual map connecting projects to goals to clarify where your focus should be. This will help ensure that every creative endeavor aligns with your strategic direction and contributes to your organization's success.

Reduce your business goal into a single sentence and draw a circle around it. The creative project to select is the one that hits the centre of the circle. If more than one achieves the same result, then choose the one that will give you the most fun doing it.

🔍✨ Prioritize projects by how well they hit your business targets. Check the impact, align with goals, and pick the ones that make your vision pop! 🚀🎯

I always divide my creative projects into three broader heads: a. Always working: One that always help us meet the goals and objectives b. Experiments: Something very new. The aim here is only reach, CTRs and impressions. For social media, it could be likes, follows and so on. c. Competition: These are the ones which keeps our creatives inline with the competition Now, basis the season, organizational goals and the requirements from various teams, I prioritize projects which will help the team achieve the higher goals.

Ideas are one thing; delivery is another. Never underestimate the resources required to deliver creative projects. They take huge amounts of thinking, time, mistakes, rethinking and execution. Spreadsheets and timelines won't help; you need everyone around the table discussing the opportunities and the challenges.

I'm going to stick my neck out here. Manageable risks are another way of saying mitigate risk, which is a polite way of saying remove the risk, which generally means do nothing risky. Which is why most creative works are bland and miss the mark. You need to address the level of appetite for risk early. More risk = more potential to both mess up or create outstanding results. That's what risk is, the difference between pathetic and amazing.

Let's be honest, if you've got too much work coming in, that's a great problem to have... I'd look at the new projects and decide based on time and money. Worrying about your brand's visibility because one project may be for a bigger, more known company is not the way to go about it.. those larger companies oftentimes are less fun creatively and the relationships you make with those brands are often less tight than those you may make with a smaller brand. Plus, the smaller brands that allow for more creative control often become larger brands and you become their trusted secret weapon.

Our strategic market fit brings us back to reevaluating our purpose. Same service, same sector but different missions. Choosing projects over others need to factor in values alignment with the clients, assessing any hidden costs, risks and expectations, and ensuring no distortion of our DNA.

It starts with your own creative strategy and sharp positioning for your company. Then evaluate the opportunities based on whether they play to your desired sweet spot or challenge you to go beyond. Judge the client mindset too - check if they are open to your kind of disruptive creative concepts or if they have already defined a rigid box. Often, the way you are briefed is a clear indication - it assesses not just the wavelength but the potential of the relationship. Arrive at the shortlist based on the excitement of the creative challenge, the possibility of showcase work and the team’s professional fulfilment. Do not make the first decision based on money, however tempting - because money can never buy the adrenaline rush of a big idea.

Follow your gut. You've been in this business long enough to instinctively know what is right and wrong. True, you may make a mistake, but a person who has never made a mistake has made nothing at all.

To choose creative projects that align with your business goals, start by evaluating each project’s potential impact on your objectives. Prioritize projects based on how well they support your strategic goals, considering factors such as target audience, market trends, and resource availability. Use a scoring system or matrix to objectively assess each project’s alignment and potential return on investment. Communicate the rationale behind your choices to stakeholders, ensuring that selected projects are clearly tied to business priorities and expected outcomes.