Effective Feedback for Creative Projects

Every third Wednesday of the month, we host our Third Wednesday Webinars, where we bring you expert insights on a variety of topics. If you weren’t able to attend our last webinar, we’re including the video and transcript for Effective Feedback for Creative Projects, hosted by Third Wunder founder and president, Mohamed Hamad with guest Joey Tanny, marketing director at ReviewStudio.

Mohamed Hamad: Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Third Wunder webinar, hosted every third Wednesday of the month, the Third Wednesday Webinar. Today we’re talking about creative, collaborative feedback with Joey Tanney, director of marketing at ReviewStudio.

Review studio is an online proofing tool, which helps people collaborate, give feedback and get approval on creative projects. Joey, would you like to say a few words and introduce yourself?

Joey Tanny: Sure, thanks. First of all, thanks for having me. It’s very exciting to see you launching this webinar. I know that you have a lot of interesting people to talk to, so I’m honored to be on this webinar.

So yeah, I’ve been heading up marketing initiatives at ReviewStudio for the past five years. It’s been a very interesting journey. If you’d asked me five years ago what I thought about effective creative feedback, I would have told you I have no idea what that is. So it’s really interesting to be here today talking about it.

You know, I speak to hundreds of customers a year and if you add that up—so I’ve heard a lot of stories, good, bad, ugly about creative feedback. So yeah, I’m very interested here to talk to you about it and here I know because as you know, you’re an agency president, so you’ve been working a lot with a lot of clients and a lot of creative processes. So, it’s very interesting to hear your perspective, as well as your experiences.

Mohamed: Yeah, I mean, creative, creative collaboration is at the heart of what we do at Third Wunder.

It’s always a challenge to make sure that everybody’s on the same page when it comes to creative projects. There’s so many stakeholders in a project. There’s so many different tools and different ways of getting feedback.

Obviously, you know, we’ve all had the jokes of client feedback coming in, in different ways, and having things like, “I just wanna make it pop a little bit more” or, you know, “I’m not sure about that.” This feels weird, but, you know, in the grand scheme of things, you know, how to give collab, how to give feedback is a little different.

Than actually managing the feedback in a project. And that’s the biggest piece there. How do you get all the feedback from different stakeholders to move a project along and make sure that you get to the finish line of a project because there could be so many delays. There’s gonna be so many different stakeholders, so many different opinions, backgrounds, and all of that.

And just wanna throw it out there to our viewers here. What are some of the challenges that you’ve got, when it comes to collaborative feedback or creative projects in general? What are some of the most interesting things that you’ve heard? Throw them out in the comments in the chat there.

And, also, by the way, as we go through this discussion, if you have any questions, please throw them into the comments and we’ll address them towards the end of this webinar. Joey’s gonna give us some interesting tips on how to manage creative collaboration, and we’ll answer questions towards the end.

In saying that, Joey, how do you see creative feedback sessions going? Because there’s so many things happening. What are some of the experiences that you’ve had with ReviewStudio?

Joey: Yeah, so I think when you start a conversation about creative feedback, the best place to start is—say there’s two core elements to feedback, right? You have how you gather it and then how you manage it, right? So the first step in any process is getting the feedback, right? And then I think where many people fall off the cliff is going to be on managing it.

When it comes to gathering, there’s kind of two different elements, I would say. So the first one being, of course, your skills as a communicator, your skills, you know, do you have empathy? Are you an active listener? And that actually is how you give good feedback, right?

And then there’s a whole element of, of where that resides. So what tools are you using? Are you burying it deep inside an email? Are you putting it inside your project management tool? And then that becomes difficult to in turn manage, which comes in after you give good feedback, right? So, when you’re approaching feedback, it really is holistically. I could give you tips on gathering feedback, but I’m sure everybody here really has that part nailed down. I hope.

But I think where a lot of people fail is in the second part of that, which is the managing of [feedback].

So on what platform do you gather it and then ultimately, where does it sit? Where does it stay? I think a lot of people do it in a range of ways, right?

So, there’s productivity elements when you’re talking about collaboration, right? For example, when you hop on a Zoom call and you give people feedback, you might, you know, go on Teams if you’re forced to use Microsoft tools. You might also use Slack or, email is probably the most common form, right? You’re going to send a long email with your video markups or change requests and whatever.

Oftentimes they happen in project management tools, so I mean, there’s a list there and everybody has their own tools.

And then they also happen in asset managers, so you can go into Google Drive, you can go into Box and leave very quick small pieces of feedback on any range of files, but it doesn’t live in the right space to take action, right? And then the final thing is every creator has content creation tools that they like, right? So you have Photoshop, there are elements of Markup.

We use Figma internally. Of course, we can internally, that’s not an issue if we want to mark up a Figma file and definitely Google Docs. I mean, everybody loves using Google Docs.

And the worst, of course, is an Excel spreadsheet. And we have so many stories of people delivering feedback via Excel spreadsheets. So you’ll have time stamps, change lists, you know, you’ll have who’s got to do it. And then from there the project management nightmare is taking that and turning that into a to do list, right? So, when it comes to the actual creative collaboration element, especially as it relates to feedback within a creative workflow and a creative process, I think everybody in this conversation can identify with that. I mean, unless you’re using ReviewStudio.

Everybody can identify with that issue of like, yes, I get feedback, and it might even be good feedback, but extracting the value and going through that thread in the email and taking that and transferring it to the project management tool, and then sending that across to the creative who’s living inside Figma or Photoshop or Design Premiere.

And then getting that creative and uploading it and sending it back to the client via, I don’t know, WeTransfer or maybe it’s getting downloaded from a project management tool, or even in Drive. And then the client has to do something with it, right? They’re, maybe they’re going to mark it, right? And then that’s kind of where we end up with a challenge of Siloed communication. So even if you’re using a creative collaboration tool, which these are for creative collaboration, these are built to be collaborative, right? What ends up happening is you get killed, you know, your creative gets killed.

It goes in so many different ways that there’s so many different sieves within the creative process that are just sucking out the creative energy, killing your margins, right? You have communication that’s unclear. You’re having decentralized communications, it’s siloed, you’re getting feedback that’s not precise. If you’re getting video feedback in an email or an Excel spreadsheet, or even in a video conference call, there are steps involved from taking the feedback through to action, let’s say.

And then every time you add that it turns into the game of broken telephone and broken telephone, as we all know, is a game because it ends up breaking down, right? Otherwise it would be pretty boring. But when it comes to creative feedback, you don’t want broken telephone, right? You want to eliminate as many steps as possible, right? And, and have it easily referenceable, right?

And then you end up with something like a black box, right? So like if somebody gave feedback to one person and then another person comes in and I’m sure you’ve experienced this on the client side, right? You send something across to the client, and then there’s two stakeholders, one gets on the phone and or Zoom and says, “hey, can you make this change?” and you make the change and the other one sends you an email, says doing this, and they’re not seeing each other.

And you have this whole kind of thing—well, why did you make this change and you can’t really bring it back to the source, right?

So you end up with a black box in a sense, right? Like who has to do what, when do they have to do it? And then of course, version control issues like, like working version 1.1-final 3, Jan 22nd, final 8—

Mohamed: That’s always the tricky one, right? Having all those really long final, final final, the real final version 3 kind of thing.

Joey: Yeah, exactly. And you’ve experienced it. We’ve all experienced it, right? And that only happens when there’s a decentralization of versioning, right? So that the versioning and the feedback isn’t connected, right? And, and then you’ve experienced this, you know what that looks like, right?

And then what happens is you have everything from feedback getting lost, you have communication overload. Nobody knows what they’re supposed to do, and turnarounds get destroyed.

The execution on—the creative execution—you’re not delivering the best content possible.

Nobody’s happy. The client’s not happy, your teams aren’t happy. The creative people are playing politics as opposed to delivering creative. And I’m just curious, from anybody listening, I’d love to hear if you identify with any of this, if you’ve experienced this. I mean, it’s definitely something.

Before I joined ReviewStudio, I have to say I remember pulling up the chair and let’s talk about this video, and then you’d write down on a piece of paper the time stamps and then they take that away and send it, you know, you’d have to wait till the next time they’re in office to sit next to them. So that’s kind of the core idea of the problem behind creative feedback, right?

So when you’re delivering creative feedback that’s siloed, decentralized, and happens in a black box, you’re gonna lose margins, you’re gonna lose—your profitability is going to suffer.

No one’s going to be happy, right? And I mean, that’s extreme. Because a lot of people are running their businesses this way. Like today, where feedback cycles are a mess.

But that is the reason I think this is interesting. All five years of, bias working for a high proofing company aside, of course, is that I think it’s really simple and straightforward to implement, right? You’re giving the same feedback that you’re already giving, but you get to do it on the right platform, right? And you don’t have to modify your workflows too much, right?

Your creatives don’t want to stop using Figma or Photoshop, right? Your clients don’t want to have to learn new tools. So finding a way to meet them in the middle, which in this case, I think what we do is, is finding a way in the middle is essential. And I think with effective feedback, it’s not that big of a challenge to get there.

Mohamed: Yeah. I mean, one of the biggest challenges of working with teams in general, and clients, and a set of stakeholders is that everybody wants to use their own tools. And they are used to their own tools, just like you said, you know, designers want to work in Figma, decision makers or project managers want to use their project management tool or just rely on email in general.

One of the bigger challenges to make sure that a project moves along is to get the right visibility. Getting key steps of a project to the right people, right? So who’s gonna have that sign off on something or approval on something, and how do you keep it moving is one of the key challenges to a creative project in general.

Joey: Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

And I mean one of the key elements there, we like to call it the feedback to action connection, right? Like, like how do you connect feedback to taking the next step, right? Like if you get an email that has a long list of points, the project manager has to go and copy paste it into their project management tool.

Maybe you have a discussion if there’s back and forth, if there’s like—if you want to figure out what did the client mean, there’s a longer email thread, things get buried, miscommunication, copy paste, again, etc. Repeat for each version.

How many mistakes are you gonna make, right?

When you have everything that’s threaded, right, and centralized, you’re able to get that clarity so much faster.

And the ability to, with a single click, turn feedback into tasks is essential, as well. And you can do that if you’re using a project management tool, right? If the client is going in there, actually, not necessarily, right? If you’re drawing—if you’re annotating a file inside a project manager, typically you can’t turn that into a task. You still have to transfer [it].

So it’s essential to be able to do that with one click and say, OK, client wants this removed, right? There’s too many birds in this corner of the image, cut these birds out, you want to be able to say, OK, apply this, right?

Mohamed: Well, there’s also the conversation around revisions as well. So even if you do get feedback and you make changes, how do you keep track of all of the changes along the way? You know, we’ve got all of the versionings and the final, final and all of that, that we’ve just mentioned. But how do you go back in time and see who made what decision?

And who approved something, so that there’s a sense of accountability there, so that there is a way to say, no, this was discussed and this was approved and signed off, and who was that?

Just so that there isn’t any confusion along the thread of getting a project out there.

Joey: I think that’s one of the biggest downfalls of the file transfer, the email, the meeting, you know.

There no,—first of all, there’s no record of the feedback to action connection, right? You don’t have anywhere that says this is the approved file or this is the final, but not only that, you don’t have the record of the history, right? You don’t have like, let’s say you’re on version 10.

What happened in version 11 to 10, you know, 12, 35, etc. to get to 10, right? So often people, on version 10, they’re like, “oh, can you add this or why doesn’t it say, why does it say this and not that?” And you don’t have that record accessible to them, right?

I think for feedback to be effective, it needs to have a history attached to it. It needs to be able to like—you know, it’s kind of like the metadata, right? The metadata is like the history of the file, right? So you’re able to go back at any point.

So, all the feedback, the previous feedback is available at the fingertips and that includes for the client, right? The client doesn’t necessarily want to work against you. They want to work with you, but they’re also working on a million other things, right? If you’re an agency or, or if you’re a brand manager, for example.

The decision makers want to understand why a decision was made, but they’re also looking at a million different things all the time. So you need to have everything centralized, right? You need to be able to retrieve it.

You need precision, right? So every time there’s anything that’s miscommunicated or is open to interpretation, you get your broken telephone. Time to action is definitely important and integration with approvals like if you send something across in an email and your client or your manager says this is approved.

Not everybody sees that, right? You have to like, I don’t know what you do, you copy paste it or I mean like you have it somewhere, but it’s not on the file for everyone to see.

One thing that we do, as well, in ReviewStudio is that we lock all the previous files. So if you’re working on version 10, you can’t add or remove anything from an earlier version. So, that builds in a system of accountability, right?

Mohamed: So, you’re creating a set of gates as you get to a certain milestone, you’re moving over and saying, “OK, this is locked in” and you can’t really change from that. This is—a decision has been made on this. And then you move forward and you keep the project going.

Joey: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And that also means that like when something is approved or rejected, right, there definitely is an idea of rejection. If you’re getting to 10 versions, everything was rejected or required changes.

All of that feedback and all of those decisions were agreed upon previously, right? So you can’t get into scope creep, you can’t get into—you know what I’m talking about if you’re in the agency space.

It’s like you can’t go back and change your mind. I mean, you could, but you’re going to have to pay for it, right? And I think that’s essential to having receipts, right?

Mohamed: I would add to that and say that the rejection is just as important as the approval reason. Like why was something rejected so that when you do come back and you look back at your notes, you understand why something was pushed aside and said no to.

And that way, if you’re doing a review of your decision-making process, there’s that clarity there of where things went, just as much as the approvals.

In saying that, when it comes to projects, revisions themselves, and the progress, with scope creep is also something that can kill margins, but also can delay projects quite a bit. And having clarity and communication along the lines of where things stood and where things are diverging. So that idea of gating and unlocking things at a specific stage, that’s also super important, I think.

Joey: And I think a big part of delays are people being lost in a sense, right? So the client wants to get this project on time. They need to get the project done on time. The creatives need to deliver on time.

Brand managers have products that need to go to market at a certain point. You need to be able to get your—whatever it might be, it could be brochures, video, banners, whatever kind of creative you’re working on.

There is a time that it’s required to be launched. You have a project, right, at a high level, you’re working on a big project. The creative is a component of it, right? And whenever that delay happens inside the creative, you’re going to end up seeing a trickle up or down effect across the entire project.

Giving people—removing barriers, removing sieves within the creative process, and in this particular case, feedback. It’s a simple application, it’s a simple solution and it really can make a huge difference because people are actually like, “OK, I want to go in, I want to provide feedback,” because it’s simple, it’s intuitive, and it’s clear, right? I don’t have to mess around.

I think it makes a huge difference.

Mohamed: Yeah, there’s also the clarity within the feedback itself and making sure that people understand how to give feedback. And obviously, there’s different guidelines and there’s different sources out there on how to give effective feedback. We touched on that earlier.

Talking about the precision of where you place that feedback, having a lot of these creative collaborative tools, um, putting comments in spaces and being very precise on what needs to change and why things need to change is also super important.

But in saying that, there’s a plethora of tools that do that. And correct me if I’m wrong, with ReviewStudio, one of the interesting things is that it doesn’t just touch on just graphics.

It can review videos, we can review a PDF. So, it has the ability to bring in all sorts of multimedia into one place, and that consolidation is also a really interesting thing in that you can have one tool centralized for all types of media, and that just makes it easy for people. Is that correct?

Joey: Yeah, so that’s a very important point because when you talk about the plethora of tools, and you say Figma has its capabilities for commenting, so does Google Docs—and if you’re only working on one media, you can probably get away with it.

And I mean that’s ignoring some of the other benefits, right? So like Google Docs, they recently released an approval feature, so it still exists, but Figma doesn’t have that, for example, as far as I know.

So, aside from that, there are obviously limitations to the feedback process within each tool. When you’re talking to your client, your client isn’t interested in learning 10 different tools per campaign, right?

If you just onboard a new client and you’re like, “oh well, here’s my stack.” So when it comes to text, we’re gonna go into Google Docs, not a problem. Your client probably is very familiar with that. It’s straightforward. But then we’re also gonna send you PDFs by email exported from Figma, but then we’re also gonna send you project management tasks in Asana. And then on web content, we can’t really do much, so we’re gonna send you a link and then just provide us a link of feedback inside an email, right?

You’re training your client, right? You’re training your managers every time, right? And you’re teaching them about new tools and you’re teaching them new processes. And every time you do that, you’re building resistance to them taking action.

I think that’s critical in any feedback processes—you need to make it as easy as possible for the end user in order for them to create that value.

So our idea is really if you’re gonna be working on a campaign and you need to share media with the customer, you should be able to do within a context, so they can see where that media fits in.

So when you have the—when you’re producing—let’s say the landing page is going to be video content. You might be creating banner ads to promote the new landing page, you’re gonna have the brochure, the PDF of the white paper.

You could send your client to 10 different places and yeah, you’re gonna, it’s gonna end up—you can imagine where it’s gonna end up.

Mohamed: So we’re almost running out of time here and I wanted to get some questions from our viewers. If you have any questions, please pop them into the chat.

So, from Icare, “what’s your go to strategy for giving clear and constructive feedback on creative projects?” I think I’ll take this one.

To give really clear feedback, I think that is part of the onboarding process when you are engaging with a new client, making sure that they understand what the feedback process is and where they’re going to be getting their assets to review. Like we said before, if it’s going to be text and you’re going to be sharing a Google Doc, make sure to make it clear that you’re going to be using suggested editing or comments in copy instead of just plain overwriting what you’ve written.

So that there is a collaboration there. But when it comes to graphic and visual elements, having a clear guideline of how to use a common tool—be specific.

And there’s plenty of ways to go about that, and we can share some resources with you guys after this webinar.

Joey: We have a ton of resources on our blog that we can share with you.

The one I like the most is never expect your managers—for example, if you’re a creative—never expect your managers or the client to be able to give you good design feedback, right?

Because at the end of the day, they’re not designers, [they don’t have] the language, right? There’s a certain language and feedback.

So, it’s part of your job as a creative, to be able to get to the core of the reason, right? You have to be expert interviewers and interrogators, if you will.

Mohamed: That goes to the question from Elizabeth “what advice would you give to designers on handling feedback that may seem overly vague or subjective?”

Joey: So I think also, to build off of that last point and everything that we’ve been talking about in terms of having the correct tools to get this feedback. There’s a frustration that builds when you can’t get to clarity quickly, right? And, and if you have that feedback in an email with 20 other points and you’re sending back the questions, the inline comments, in blue—and some have, some don’t— you have comments on some and some you don’t, and then you’re trying to figure out did I address everything—you’re going to end up in a messy situation.

If you have threaded feedback in real time, that’s accessible to everybody on your team, you’re going to see a dramatic shift in tone and clarity, of course.

Mohamed: Yeah, absolutely.

Last question here from Icare again, “can this feedback framework be adapted for use beyond creative projects?”

I would say making sure that you have a good strong feedback loop with your clients is always key, regardless of it being a creative project or not. If you’re working on large swaths of text, the project plans, contracts or anything like that, that’s always important to be able to make sure that it’s clear how to give feedback, what you’re giving feedback on.

And even if someone gives you vague feedback, being able to dig in and ask inquisitive questions to pull out what they really mean about it and making assumptions about what someone was thinking, it’s a conversation at the end of the day. Feedback is a conversation with you and your client or your stakeholders.

Joey: Yeah, when we talk about creative projects, it’s really just about any content, right? So we were like internally—I mean it’s great because at ReviewStudio, I use the product, I want to say almost every day. We use it to review contracts, presentations, internal presentations, end of year reporting.

Like it’s really—the application is really broad in that sense.

Mohamed: Awesome. We’re at about time here. It was lovely talking to you, Joey—and saying that, if you do want to connect with Joey, you can scan that QR code.

Joey’s offering up three months trial [of ReviewStudio], if you want to speak to Joey about the trial there.

Joey: So if you go to reviewstudio.com/tww Third Wednesday Webinar, we’re offering three months free of ReviewStudio at an advanced plan—so as many users as you need just to get on board, and of course, if you’d like a demo, please reach out to me or anybody on my team and we’d be happy to show you what ReviewStudio can do.

I wasn’t really going to touch on that today. We just want to talk about feedback, but ReviewStudio does everything we’ve talked about really well.

Mohamed: Also, if they want to connect with you, there’s your LinkedIn right there.

We also have an Online proofing 101 guide from ReviewStudio that you, everybody here attending will get via email after this webinar. So hopefully, you guys will enjoy that.

It was a pleasure, uh, chatting with you, Joey. This has been super insightful. Hope everybody got some value from it, and we’d love to hear your feedback about this webinar and how it went. And if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

In saying that, Happy third Wednesday.

Joey: Thanks a lot. Thanks, Mo.

Mohamed: All right, thank you guys. Cheers.

Third Wednesday Webinar Presents Effective Feedback for Creative Projects

How Community Data Is Powering Smarter Social Services in Quebec / 4 mins read

Third Wednesday Webinar Presents Beyond Traffic: How to Capture & Keep Your Audience’s Attention / 20 mins read

5 Writing Frameworks to Guide Your Content Marketing / 6 mins read

How Community Data Is Powering Smarter Social Services in Quebec

5 Writing Frameworks to Guide Your Content Marketing

From Ideation to Creation—Mastering the Blank Page

Categories

Strategy

Campaigning

Design

Development

Social Media

Branding