Some oldies from England (that’s your blog writer in case you were in any doubt) may remember an ad for a chocolate biscuit with the stuttering catchphrase of p-p-p-pick-up-a-penguin. In today’s business the outsourcing option is often about picking up a person to fulfil a marketing requirement.

The drivers for this are predominantly down to the increasing overlap of technology and marketing. Marketing campaigns frequently contain components that require a more technical approach and specialized production skills. This goes beyond the use of packages for design: today a designer is a hybrid of creative and coder. An obvious way to picture this is to think about the app that you want to support your marketing: there will be its purpose, its overall creative look and feel but to turn it from a visualization into a working app needs more than great creative skills, it needs to understand the world of app coding, UX design and builds – not to mention the commercial pricing and promotion through the various online marketplaces.

It’s no wonder then that when you decide to incorporate apps, video, 3-D, animation, integration with a host of APIs to pull together your different social feeds, that you decide that these things fall outside the boundaries of a traditional marketing brief. Yes I’ll brief my agency to create a campaign, but I need someone to ‘build’ me one of these new marketing elements. This desire for a p-p-p-person is often at the behest of a regular agency who acknowledge that they can’t carry the developer in their current studio model.

It’s not just for the newer, technical areas either. Holes in the marketing delivery plan are automatically assigned to a person peg to fill, which is a further challenge when hiring is under scrutiny.

At blur Group, we’d like to challenge you to stop thinking like this. You don’t need an app developer, you need to develop an app. You don’t need an animation expert, you need to create an animation. You don’t need a videographer, you need to produce a video.

OK, it may seem like a very subtle distinction. But it’s one that thought through correctly will save you considerable amounts of money and time. Finding a person, even on a short-term freelance basis, involves resume-vetting, interviewing, checking how they’ll fit within your team and business. The other unknown element is that you have to decide how long something will take in advance and then hire on that basis.  This has cost implications for both over- and under-running.

Briefing exactly what you want doing as a project, becomes the easy option. You are simply stating what you want to get done in the terms in which you understand it. As a marketing person I’m sure I don’t know all the skills that make up the iPhone app developer, but I can say, fairly succinctly what I want an iPhone app to look like and do.

This is the approach that is the bedrock of the Creative Services Exchange. We have over 12,000 14,000 creative professionals and agencies with a host of skills on the Exchange but they respond to project briefs. Pitches are for projects, not people. It’s sometimes a little tricky for people to understand when they’ve seen sites with ‘people-for-hire’ on them. But it’s simple really. You brief your project and the best pitch for the project is how you move forward. And when that project is complete and you need a different approach for your next requirement, you brief a project again. That way you pay for each project, not for the downtime of a person. It also means that you choose the best solution. It could be a sole supplier, it could be an agency, it could be a mixture. What it will be, is the right way to deliver your marketing need.

When you want to drive your marketing forward brief what you want to see at the Creative Services Exchange. It’s less time-consuming than finding a person, you use your familiar language and – vital for these tight budget times – it will save you money over other ways to source. There’s no alternative.