You’ve been handed a creative assignment to execute. Quick: How much input do you need? 
 
Question: Is that even a valid question? 
 
You bet it is. If you think this is simply a matter of “Well, it depends on what I receive,” then think again. 
 
Creative assignments vary in scope and medium, but they all have one thing in common: Interpretation. Your job, as a creative pro, is to take what is basically un-creative yet factual input, and come up with an enticing, all-new creative spin for it. “Don’t sell the steak; sell the sizzle.” That kind of assignment. 
 
Still, you need to know enough about the product or solution you’re selling—and, even more importantly, the target audience you’re selling it to—before you can begin ideating. 
 
Which begs a very important question that you may not have thought about before, because these things get tossed your way all the time, and they’re on deadline, and you just do them, so why would you think about it? 
 
But the question is the topic of this article: How much input do you need? 
 
Put another way: How much is too much? How much is too little? What, in other words, is the Goldilocks-just-right optimal amount of input for you to nail that creative assignment? 
 
Think big (or small)
 
Not-so-irrelevant digression: We’ve noticed that old people invariably pine to be younger. And kids invariably can’t wait to grow up. Which suggests that there must be one magical age that all people yearn to be. We asked a Generation Z’er. She said, without a moment’s hesitation: “Twenty-three.”
 
As we said, a digression. 
 
But not wholly off the mark. Your optimum-input dilemma follows a similar logic. An easy way to arrive at the answer is to think in terms of wildly exaggerated extremes, and then carve your way back to the sweet-spot middle. 
 
For example: You need to create a two-sided sell sheet. The client input consists of an email that says “Make something exciting about our ABC offering! It’s better than what others offer!" 
 
Clearly, way too little. 
 
You can see where this is going. But you might not see the profitable takeaway quite so easily. 
 
True story: Not long ago, we were assigned a two-sided sell-sheet by a client. The input? They emailed us 100 pages of material. 
 
Obviously, this was way too much. Not quite so obviously, it was also an opportunity. 
 
A time for leverage
 
When we received this 100 pages of input, we immediately told the client, “That’s too much.” They said, “No, we think it’s fine. Send us a bid for the project.” 
 
And so we bid on it, all right. Our bid included the massive amount of time it would take us to pore through all 100 pages of stuff, to cull out what we needed to create two pages. We’re not the greatest mathematicians here at Copel Communications, but even we can tell you that that’s a 50x ratio.
 
This bid was expensive. It had to be. We can’t simply carve out that much time and effort to create what would otherwise be a small, basic assignment, without charging to cover all that extra time. 
 
When they saw the bid, the client was taken aback. “Wow,” they said, “that’s more than what we expected.” 
 
Now comes the fun part. 
 
We were able, at this point, to be generous. “How about we make you a deal?” we offered. “If you can carve the input down to an essential five pages, we’ll knock the price in half.” 
 
Get this: They thanked us for that offer. The next day, five pages arrived. And everyone was happy. 
 
The golden ratio
 
The lesson here is that you need to speak up, and do so immediately. Don’t be shy. And certainly don’t wait until you’re on Page 32 of the input to go griping to the client that you need more time, more money, or both. But do couch it positively: “I’d like to do this for a lower price!” That will get their attention, every time. 
 
It will also condition them, going forward. Here’s another trick: (virtual) Post-It’s. That client probably doesn’t have the time to cull the individual slides from that massive PowerPoint deck, or diagrams from that report, but they can add little “stickies” to point out just the things you need to know... if you ask them to. 
 
And we ask. All the time. It’s not impolite. It’s professional.
 
Finally, to address the ingoing question of this article: Just how much input do you need? Well, the answer will depend on the type of assignment and the type of input, but we find that about a three-to-one ratio is nice. That’s for written input. If it’s visual input, the ratio can go much higher—as high as ten-to-one—because it’s easy to look through images quickly and make snap judgments thereon. 
 
Need help with that next creative assignment? Contact us. We’d love to help. And we won’t be shy when it comes to helping you cull the input. 

So many marketing topics seem straightforward, until you dive into them. This is one of those. 
 
The germ of this story came from a client assignment we were handed recently. Our client was going to be presenting at a prestigious webinar, and wanted us to write a blog article about the event. 
 
So the question became: When should this article run? Before the event? After the event? Which would be better? 
 
The answer, incidentally, depended on the answers to a few other questions. 
 
Think ahead
 
As always, we wanted to know who the audience would be. Again, not so simple! Because there are two audiences at play here: 1) the audience our client would be presenting to, in the webinar, and 2) the audience for the blog article. You can’t assume they’re the same. Indeed, they weren’t. 
 
By the way, we’ve been saying “blog article,” because that’s what this client asked us to write. But it could just as easily have been “press release,” “e-blast,” or “social campaign.” They’re all different flavors of the same assignment. 
 
So here are the answers we got to the who-the-audiences-are question: 
 
1) The audience at the webinar would be professional peers within an internal-services vertical that our speaker represented, within the client’s business. 
 
2) The audience for the blog post was to be wholly different: Prospective clients of our client’s business—and not other internal-services professionals. 
 
In other words, this was a prestige play. Our client was to be showing off their thought leadership to a distinguished audience of professional peers, and they wanted the rest of the world to know that they were thought leaders, top-to-bottom, even in internal-service functions that prospective clients wouldn’t experience firsthand. Follow? 
 
Do the two replies above help to answer the “timing” question? Not on their own. But they’re essential input for creating the blog. 
 
Who owns who? (Or what?)
 
The next question we asked was: “Who’s hosting this webinar? Is it you? Or someone else?” 
 
Answer: “Someone else.” 
 
Aha. That’s the big one. Because if our client were hosting this upcoming webinar, the obvious follow-up question is, “Would you like to boost registrations and attendance?” The obvious answer to that would be “Of course.” And then the obvious answer to “When should this get posted?” would be “In advance. Naturally.” 
 
But that wasn’t the case here. Some other entity—in this case, an industry trade group—was hosting the webinar. They were doing all the promoting and attendance-building. That was their problem. At the same time, they had a whole slate of featured speakers to promote; our client was just one of them. So our client would get lost in the sauce of the trade group’s promotional efforts. Which is why they wanted their own self-promoting blog. Which is why they turned to us. Again: Follow? 
 
So now we had enough information to discuss with our client, and come to a mutual agreement on, the timing. They certainly could have promoted it in advance: “We will be proud to be presenting at the ABC Webinar next month!” That would show that we’d been selected to join this prestigious group of presenters, so that’s not bad. 
 
Side note: There isn’t “the right” answer to the timing question. It’s more like “the best” answer to the timing question. You need to weigh different factors. 
 
Working with the client, we chose to promote this after-the-fact. Because it would still show that we’d been selected to join this prestigious group of presenters, so no loss there. We’d have the benefit of final attendance info to bolster our blog (“Over 10,000 attendees from more than 15 countries!” “Keynote speakers included Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, both of whom made last-second commitments!” That kind of stuff.) We could quote the rave reviews our client-speaker received. And, unlike the trade group, we had zero vested interest in boosting attendance in advance. 
 
See? “Best answer.” Not “the right” answer. 
 
Rules of thumb
 
You might not have noticed this, but all the advertising for a big Hollywood movie always appears before the movie opens. The idea is to build as much hype and excitement as possible in order to have the biggest-possible opening weekend. Once the movie opens, the advertising virtually vanishes. You might not have noticed this before, but watch for it next time—even as theaters are shuttered and “openings” become more firmly cemented online. This is Hollywood’s approach. 
 
Is it the best approach? That’s the topic of a different blog. Is your opening-weekend box office the most important thing anymore? Highly debatable. 
 
Similarly, you’ll see hype about politicians unveiling their latest initiative... after they do it. They generally won’t tell you, in advance, “We’re working on some new thing.” Sure, you could find that info if you dig, but it’s not what they choose to hype. Their reasoning? They want massed glory and constituent approval, all at the same time. 
 
Our point here is that there are pre-existing conventions for the timing of different hype-able events, and you can learn, and draw your own conclusions, from how they are similar, or dissimilar, to your situation. 
 
Have a promotional-timing issue you’d like to discuss? Contact us. We dive into these thorny weeds with our clients all the time.