Between Warhol and Worthy

It has been said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But when it comes to beauty that’s being created for a fee, the creator needs to understand the importance of billable rates and how to adjust their efforts.

It’s a good dilemma to have… a creative team that is so talented that you have to modulate their output to ensure they are fulfilled while making sure your agency is not going under due to the amount of time it takes to create. If you leave it to a creatives way of thinking, we’ll keep making tweaks and updates forever. We are never satisfied. But to remain profitable you have to figure out how to scope the amount of work you can put into a project, and then stick to it.

To help my teams with this distinction, I started defining projects as Warhol or Worthy. For us, Warhol projects were those unique opportunities that came about once in awhile that truly were open for full creative expression and design. These often came from that rare client you’ve built a great relationship with who says things like, “I trust you. You know our brand.” These are truly the best clients to have and the best assignments to work on. Each time my team has taken these types of projects on, we pour ourselves in with full abandon. Long nights, early mornings, weekends… all hands on deck. This is when we are able to truly and fully craft. But the reality is, these are few and far between. Savor them, enjoy them, win some awards, and use them to fuel your day-to-day.

The Worthy projects are the bread and butter. They should also bring fulfillment, just a little more contained. Our goal with these more limited and defined projects is to still deliver work that is worthy of our name, but to do it within the constructs that are provided… namely budgets, time and people. We don’t have the time for unlimited revisions, the budget to add in every cool effect, or the bandwidth to hire an extensive crew. But the output still has to be stellar. This is when we earn our “professionals” or “expert” titles. This is when we demonstrate the quality and excellence of what we can do within the limits of real-world limitations.

Warhol to Worthy provides clear guidance to our creatives on the level of time and effort they were allowed to unleash.

But what about non-creatives? To give them a reference to use in describing just how much creative effort they desired, we introduced the idea of “Design Volume.” (Most often they would associate this with budget, but eventually we got them to understand that this guidance also impacted time and team as well.)

For the high concept projects, which were our Warhols, we used the term “High Volume.” For the snazzy but not too elaborate, which were our Worthy projects, we defined these as “Medium Volume.” The quick-turn, no-time jobs, which no one really likes but are still needed, we ranked as “Low Volume.” A cool graphic with some reference images solidified the understanding and helped everyone understand what they were asking for and what they should expect.

Operating effectively between Warhol and Worthy, or between High and Low Volume, is when a creative team truly starts to show value, and when an agency truly harnesses the range of what they can produce.