Choosing your creative provider is a major decision. Whether it’s for a one-off project or for a longer term relationship the decision will have a major impact on your marketing and your business.

Your creative drives your brand and the resulting engagement with your (potential) customers. So how do you go about making the right choice? One that will enhance and augment your market perception. More importantly, one that will have a direct impact on the business bottom line as the interaction and engagement grows.

The difficulty with creative selection is that it is often an emotionally-led decision. When choosing a provider the long list is normally based on the logical and rational, looking at suppliers with the right credentials in your market, the skills you’re looking for and the pedigree that proves success. There’ll be a check that there’s no conflicts and that logistical issues are covered – able to work for your size of company and your size of budgets.

But then there’s the side that can push aside the sensible in an instant. You fall in love with amazing creative. The heart firmly rules the head. Everything on paper says agency A should be your best provider, but agency B produced such great pitch concepts.

From this point come many difficult problems. Other people in the decision-making process will want to know why you didn’t choose that firm who were doing that really quirky video branding. If you do choose them you’re going to have to work doubly hard to actually deliver ROI. The wow factor may, indeed wow you, but what if it doesn’t wow the audience you want. Or is going to take so long to produce that the wow has been eroded.

Make sure that you have both head and heart in fine working order. Get everyone on to the same page and list all the criteria that matter to you, weight them by their importance and run a scorecard.

You can include the initial basics like creds as part of that scoring. But really it’s like a cv: if they don’t have the right qualifications what are they doing in the room with you in the first place. You want to consider on the way they respond to your business and marketing-critical brief.

Too many selection criteria and the task becomes cumbersome: once again you are distracted by the excitement of the creative and forget to mark correctly. Too few and you’ll still be choosing on one emotional pull.

When you use the Creative Services Exchange our brief managers will take away some of the selection headaches. They’ll ensure that the longlist part is made up of the right sort of creatives and agencies who have the credentials and background you need. Then with the level playing field that the Exchange provides, the final shortlisted pitches will all tick the requirements boxes you’ve provided so it’s just up to you to decide on the one that matches your specifics.

We’re also helping you with that shortlist scoring. Here’s our short and simple scorecard for you to use, based on the many selection processes that we’ve run: Scorecard.  It’s usable for any creative selection process, but you know that it makes sense for your business to use it for the Creative Services Exchange. That way you’re already starting to get the ROI you want, and you can focus on the bigger reasons why you’re looking for a new creative provider for any sort of project.