Why Creatives Are Their Own Worst Enemies, with Jess Abdulnour [Full Transcript]

This is the full transcript of episode 15 of Creative Ops Compass, “Why Creatives Are Their Own Worst Enemies, with Jess Abdulnour.” Jess is the founder of Brand Nué Agency and spent years running creative operations in-house before launching her own firm. In this conversation, we discuss why creative teams so often lack a feedback loop connecting their work to business outcomes, the "Creative ID" system Jess built to fix that, and why the harder problem usually isn’t access to data, it’s mindset.

You can listen to the full episode here.

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Intro

Jesse Krinsky: Welcome to Creative Ops Compass, the podcast for in-house creative leaders who want to run tighter operations, improve stakeholder relationships, and position their teams as genuine strategic partners. I'm Jesse Krinsky, a creative operations consultant and the founder of In Focus Consulting.

Jess Abdulnour: There is this stigma that creatives are incapable of the business side of things, which I think is total hogwash, right? But on the flip side, I think the harsher reality is that creatives have bought into that

Jesse Krinsky: Today I'm talking with Jess Abdulnour. She's the founder of Brand Nué Agency, a brand design firm. Before launching the agency, Jess spent years running creative ops in-house, building systems for teams operating across regulated industries like insurance, finance, and legal. One of the problems she kept running into, at company after company, was that the creative team had no idea how their work was actually performing. No feedback loop. No data. No connection between the assets they were producing and the business outcomes those assets were supposed to drive. She eventually built a system to fix that, and we'll get into it in detail today. But the deeper issue she found goes beyond access to data. It's about how creatives see themselves and their role in the business. And it cuts both ways: leadership undervalues the creative team, yes. But creatives also undervalue themselves, and that's the harder problem to solve.

THE CREATIVE OPS FEEDBACK LOOP PROBLEM

Jesse Krinsky: So you recently launched your own brand design firm. It's called Brand Nué Agency. But before that, you also spent time as a creative ops director in house. Can you tell us about what did that in house experience teach you that shapes the work that you're doing with clients now?

Jess Abdulnour: Yeah, absolutely. think one of the reasons I decided to open the Brand Nué agency simply was because I had so much past experiences in-house realizing that there are common issues that you see throughout the strata of business size, whether you're a startup or a top Fortune 500 company, you tend to see the same obstacles and issues when it comes to brand and specifically quantifying the measurable impact it has onto the business. So I was inspire d to start the Brand Nué agency to help a bunch of companies using my past experience, teaching them the same skill sets, the same structures and systems to implement creative ops and do brand in order to scale their businesses.

Jesse Krinsky: So as a creative ops director, what did the feedback loop between your team and the performance side of the business look like? What were you getting? What were you missing?

Jess Abdulnour : Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think this is a common occurrence that any creative will be, will sound very familiar to them where communication was non-existent, right? Typically they may, if they're lucky, get some feedback saying, yeah, this performed great, awesome. And then that would be the extent of everything. And I think a lot of that came down to there's this preconception that creatives are not analytical people. And so they don't give them access to the analytics or if they do have access to those data platforms, it's not optimized for the creative brain to interpret. A lot of it is just like random numbers and acronyms and it's just really hard to get some insights into it. So one of the reasons I was brought on to a lot of my past positions was to help bridge the gap between creative and performance. And to also empower the creatives to take ownership because they really are the ones in charge of the creative, the messaging, and there is a very unquantifiable value that creative brings to performance, but because of the lack of attribution and the way to track it all, I think it gets relegated a lot of times to like arts and crafts, and you're just taking a shotgun approach rather than understanding there’s strategy behind the creative.

Jesse Krinsky: I agree with all that. would also add that some of the reasons that stakeholders don't share performance data with creatives can be because one, they're not tracking the performance of the creative. For instance, I worked with an in-house video team that was producing almost 2,000 videos a year. But when they took a look at the marketing reports from the internal brands, video was barely mentioned at all. So there was all this work that was being done. But actually, in this case, no one was tracking it. Also, in some cases stakeholders don't want to share the data because they fear that the information is power. And if they were to relinquish some of that, that it minimizes their value in the business. Have you seen that at all?

Jess Abdulnour: I do think that that mentality comes more from culture and that's more of a systemic-like symptom of a root cause that could be pervasive across a bunch of different areas where I think Where I see the issue more is maybe this like accepted standard that creatives don't impact performance. They're not business people. And I think it's something that not just the business side or maybe the performance side of the business believes in. think creatives also buy into that narrative where "I'm just a creative. My only role is to come up with fun ideas and storytelling and design aspects." I think a lot of that has to do with number one, until recently, there really haven't been any platforms available to creatives in order for them to analyze the data in a way that they understand it. Like creatives have a huge capacity for pattern recognition, but they don't see it through numbers, they see it through visuals or messaging or themes. So there hasn't been a platform to empower them, but secondly, I think they've kind of put themselves in this box where, well, I'm a creative and then the business side of things also enforces that narrative and it causes this separation between creative and performance.

WHAT IT ACTUALLY COSTS

Jesse Krinsky: Absolutely, absolutely. So you have seen, firsthand, so what happens when the creative team isn't able to connect their work to business outcomes. In your experience, how did that impact the team's standing with leadership? Did it affect how leadership understood the creative team's value, how budget was allocated, how headcount was justified?

Jess Abdulnour: Yeah, I mean, I think it relegated creatives to the role of production. So, the only value that they have to the business was the amount they produced. I mean, anyone in the creative field knows that's not a way to really embrace creativity or get the best ideas because now you put the creatives in a factory mindset. It's how many elements can I produce? How quickly can I do it? I also think it gives a lot of leadership, the ability to say, great, well, you we could just use AI now and we could populate even more and reducing the importance of quality and value and strategy that goes into it. And then surely what will happen is performance will start to tank or plateau. And then that's when there's a lot of tension put on the creatives and they're kind of floating in the dark because they have no idea what performed or what didn't perform and they're not given the freedom and space in order to execute creative that speak to people and can convert.

Jesse Krinsky: Going back to something that we were talking about earlier is that one of the reasons often I've seen that stakeholders don't give this information, the performance metrics, because they're not measuring them themselves, They might be measuring something that they think is relevant, important to their team. but it's not necessarily connected to the creative assets that they're requesting. One of the ways that I always recommend my clients try to get to the bottom of what the value of the work is that they are asked to produce is in their, in a kickoff conversation where there's room for back and forth for asking probing questions and follow ups is to ask very pointed questions, not just what's the message, what's the purpose, what's the audience, also the why. Why is that the metric that is relevant here? Asking what KPI does this level up to. Very often, again, stakeholders aren't prepared to answer that kind of question. Eventually, after a few repetitions, they are capable of answering those questions. By just asking, those questions helps the creatives stop thinking about themselves as order takers. It helps redirect their minds, but also their stakeholders. Because now the stakeholders, with some coaching, begin to see that the creatives are not only there to just respond and just give what you need, what you've asked for, but they are necessarily partners, when you're in house you should be a partner.

THE CID SYSTEM

Jesse Krinsky: I know in your recent role you created something that you call the creative ID system to track performance data. So tell us about that. What was it and why was it needed?

Jess Abdulnour: Yeah, that's a great question. This goes back to like, how do you share information in a way that a creative can get insights from it? And so, in one of my previous roles, we had the issue that we had several different analytic and tracking tools across different types of use cases. So that could be anything from Google Ads, Meta Ads, an internal Tableau report, internal DAM software, and different teams used different analytics and tracking tools for their own use cases. But for the creative team, they only had insight into the project management. So that is why it reinforced that they were just producers. The problem was the feedback loop. They were a completely remote team across multiple different time zones, countries and languages. And there had to be a way to unify the information without the business over-investing in new or custom software in order to integrate the information. So the idea was rather than trying to create an overarching software that could manage everything, why don't we create an ID that would be associated with the creative so we could track it across these different platforms? So you could relate it to like a social security number. And it was such a great, simple hack because you just had to add a field to all of these platforms and you could instantly connect the dots on everything. Where it related back to the creatives, now that they had the creative ID, the different associated teams, whether that was the media buyer or the growth team could relay their information on whether the creative performed well or not from their viewpoint. So then our creative team could start organizing information based off of top performers, low performers, anything like that. And they could derive their own creative insights now because they have a native tool and that feedback mechanism in order to get that information and take action on it.

Jesse Krinsky: This is such a remarkable idea. It's something that I had not heard of before. Let's take a quick step back and I'd like to know before you built the system, what was the team being measured on? What was a good job from leadership's perspective?

Jess Abdulnour: Honestly, I think it was very subjective. I think it was like, yeah, our creative team is awesome. They churn out a bunch of work for us. And when I came in, they were putting like 60, 70 hour weeks at certain points, especially on busy time, just trying to catch up with all of the projects that were assigned to them. So you could imagine they barely had the time to catch up with requests, let alone do analysis on the creative.

Jesse Krinsky: So once you started connecting the creative work to performance data, did it change how the creative team thought about the work itself and themselves? Or was it primarily used for reporting upward?

Jess Abdulnour : No, I mean, it helped across the board. Like the art director at that particular company was able to justify a lot of his creative decisions using the performance data. So if there was something in the past where he felt very strongly about that he wanted to go in a certain creative direction, a lot of times it would just be shut down without any further engagement on the topic. Now, when he came up to leadership he could support his hypotheses with actual numbers. And so it changed a lot of the conversation from, well, the art director is just going on a whim of fancy to, wow, he's bringing a really strategic approach to the creative performance. And on the flip side, the business team now looked at creative as, there is some kind of algorithm here that is beyond my scope of understanding, similarly to how they might look at coding or development and say, I can see the end result, but I don't know and understand the nuances the way the creative team does.

THE HARDER PROBLEM IS MINDSET

Jesse Krinsky: So in some companies, the problem is more technical, right? The data exists, but it's siloed. Actually getting access to it is challenging. But then, as we've been saying, there's also a mindset side of this as well, right? Where creatives don't necessarily see performance as something that they need to be concerned about. Which of those two do you think is harder to solve?

Jess Abdulnour: I think it's harder to empower a creative to say that they have the abilities to analyze the data than it is to sell leadership on performance or having more data. I think leadership, there is a logical argument that you can say whenever you're dealing with any obstacles and challenges where, hey, it's like, we just wanna perform better. Is that still a priority? And nine times out of 10, yeah, that's a great idea. On the other hand, trying to tell a creative, hey, you need to know numbers. That's an emotional obstacle that's really hard to overcome because a lot of times I feel like creatives go into being creative because they hate STEM, because they hate business or math. And so I think you're overcoming a lot of, misconceptions or insecurities. And that's a lot more difficult to open up to, especially in a professional environment.

Jesse Krinsky: So the most valuable lesson I learned when I was in business school was one sentence, very simple, but its simplicity belied how deep it was. it was just this. It's not what you say, it's what they hear. Basically, if your point is not being appreciated, it's not entirely on these Philistines these savages who just don't get it. That may make you feel good to just kind of grumble, but you haven't gotten anywhere. You need to be the one, you being the creative leader in this case, need to learn how to communicate to the stakeholders or to leaders. in terms that matters to them. Why should they care? Why should they want to share this data? Why should they be willing to commit to an hour long kickoff call when they've already sent you a quick intake form? The answer is because it benefits them. And that is how this needs to be positioned.

Jess Abdulnour: Yeah, I mean, I think it goes back to what I said a little bit earlier. Like there is this stigma that creatives are incapable of the business side of things, which I think is total hogwash, right? But on the flip side, I think the harsher reality is that creatives have bought into that. To be a little bit real and a little bit blunt without trying to insult anybody, If you wanted to be creative for the sake of being creative, then you should have been an artist. And that means you are creating for your pleasure only and for the message that you feel compelled to share. And I think there is a lot of nobility in that. However, when you come into the business world, you have decided that you're going to use this talent that you have in order to impact the business positively. And so, I only think it can just enable you for growth and for a lot of opportunity if you are able to find a way to bridge your creative talent and explain it through the lens of business. Because then you'll be taken more seriously, your work will perform a lot better, and quite frankly, if you're able to manage both sides of your brain that way, You just have this indescribable talent of being able to influence people at scale through your messaging. And that gives you unlimited possibilities, whether it's in your personal career or on behalf of the business you work for.

Jesse Krinsky: Absolutely. What I often tell creative teams is that your job is not to produce videos or create beautiful graphics. Your job really is the same as the IT department and HR and mergers and acquisition. It's to deliver value. And the vehicle for your value is creative assets, But that can be a very difficult mindset shift for creatives, but it is essential to understand why you're actually there. Once they understand that and appreciate that, Then they can start thinking more differently about how to connect their work in ways that stakeholders haven't thought of and going back to your point about AI, right? Yes, creatives are rightfully concerned to some degree about what it means for their viability, but the creatives who really should be worried about that are the ones who are focused primarily on outputs.

AI AND THE OUTCOME-MINDED CREATIVE

Jess Abdulnour: What I think is a harmful turnaround is thinking that AI can replace you. It's the same way how in the 90s designers were worried that Adobe Photoshop was gonna replace them. It's not, it's gonna empower you to create more. Now it also gives you the ability to be a generalist. You're not stuck being just a video editor or just a graphic designer or just anything. You can now be a creative director. You can implement your own stuff in-house and it gives you that free time to develop the business skills you need to say, hey, you know, it's not enough just to put an ad out there. I can tell you why this creative performs well. I've done the research, I've done a bunch of strategy and I built this creative to perform. and I have the metrics to quantify it. in my mind, yes, it's going to kill some aspects of the industry, but I think that is negligible in comparison to the amount of growth opportunities that are available to you.

Jesse Krinsky: I agree and I'll also add that you referenced how creatives can use AI to expand their skill set. also regarding performance data, it also makes it easier to not just capture but analyze that data, right? Because as you've been saying, creatives are often not so comfortable with data, certainly not data analytics, but the access to AI tools that can take massive amounts of data and explain it, in a way that is understandable to the creatives. And then by the way, the creatives can ask their LLM, to help them translate this into terms that are relevant to their stakeholders and to leadership. Yes, there are risks to AI, but this is also one of the great opportunities that creatives have with it. It's not related to the creative production, but it does help unlock a clear understanding of what that creative is doing and can do. And I'm very excited about that. Jess, thank you so much for speaking to me today, for sharing this. I love this creative idea system that you created. I think there's the concept behind it and the way that you implemented it and but how you and your team were able to make use of that data to change minds, both the creatives and leadership and stakeholders minds is really instructive. So, thank you so much.

Jess Abdulnour: No, thank you for having me.

Outro

Let's recap the key insights from today's conversation.

First: flying blind is a choice, even when it doesn't feel like one. The performance data usually exists somewhere in the organization. You don't always need custom software or a major overhaul to access it. Jess built the Creative ID system by adding a single field to tools her team was already using. The complexity was never the real barrier. If you want to implement this yourself, Jess and I put together a step-by-step guide to the Creative ID system. You can find it in the show notes.

Second: the mindset problem is harder than the technical one. Getting creatives to see performance as their concern means asking them to overcome identities and insecurities that go back to why they got into creative work in the first place. One way to get past that is through trust, familiar tools, and making data visual. And the same principle applies to stakeholders. You can’t change that dynamic by demanding to be respected. You change it by speaking in terms that matter to the other person.

And third: your job is not to make assets. It's to deliver value through assets. Once a creative team truly internalizes that, everything about how they work changes: how they take a brief, how they ask questions in a kickoff, how they relate to the people they're serving. Everything else follows from that.

If you found value in today's episode, please subscribe and leave a review. Let me know what creative ops challenges you're facing, what topics would help your team work better. And if you've successfully tackled a creative ops challenge that other teams struggle with, I'd love to hear about that too. Reach out through the contact info in the show notes.

Thanks for listening.