The Creative vs. The Marketing Team

It seems like the clos­er I get to the last day at my cur­rent job, the more time I have to focus on all the things I find frus­trat­ing with my cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. My favorite pas­times include vis­it­ing the amaz­ing web­site Clients From Hell. It helps to know I’m not alone in my mis­ery.

I am also get­ting caught up on my Google Read­er sub­scrip­tions and came across this lit­tle gem today — The Cre­ative vs. The Mar­ket­ing Team: Yin And Yang, Oil And Water — Smash­ing Mag­a­zine.

The rea­son I like this arti­cle is because it breaks down the issues between cre­ative and mar­ket­ing teams and encour­ages design­ers to stand up for them­selves and their work. It is, of course, writ­ten from the per­spec­tive of a cre­ative per­son, but it doesn’t put all the blame on mar­ket­ing peo­ple. The author is real­ly seek­ing to have us all work bet­ter togeth­er.

When mar­ket­ing peo­ple and cre­ative peo­ple can come togeth­er, it’s great. I hope to expe­ri­ence that some day. The major­i­ty of the mar­ket­ing peo­ple I work with don’t respect the role of the design­er or the designer’s time. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, in my cur­rent role, I do not have the author­i­ty to push back or chal­lenge our clients. I do as I’m told and watch projects fall apart and see time and mon­ey wast­ed.

It is def­i­nite­ly encour­ag­ing to know that there are some places where every­one works togeth­er to cre­ate the best pos­si­ble out­come. I dream about work­ing at one of those com­pa­nies in a year when I am fin­ished with grad school.

For the time being, I’m con­tent with laugh­ing at oth­er design­ers’ hor­ror sto­ries.

 When I worked at one large cor­po­ra­tion, I was clos­ing up my office and the art depart­ment at 7:00 pm on a Fri­day night when a young woman from the mar­ket­ing depart­ment caught me in the hall­way and asked to step into my now locked office. She imme­di­ate­ly went into an act about how “her” project was so impor­tant and how I had to do it by Mon­day and email it to her because she would be away for the week­end.

 I looked at her in silence. I asked who she report­ed to and learned it was one of my sub­or­di­nates (if you went by the order on the cor­po­rate mast­head). I told her I would talk to her boss on Mon­day to find out why she would have the utter nerve to hope that I would be in the office at 7:00 pm on a Fri­day night and then expect me to work all week­end on some­thing that was not impor­tant enough for such a tight dead­line. She stormed off.”

Find out how the sto­ry ends by read­ing the rest via The Cre­ative vs. The Mar­ket­ing Team: Yin And Yang, Oil And Water — Smash­ing Mag­a­zine.

It’s also fun to read all the com­ments peo­ple left and the author’s respons­es.