How does Paintgun produce outstanding creative week after week?

Alisa Chalakhyan
3 min readJun 26, 2020

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Over the last five years of its existence, Paintgun has made a name for itself as a uniquely outstanding creative asset producing agency. And over those years, we've been asked this same question over and over again: "How do you come up with marvellous creative that differentiates you from the rest of the market?" Many are surprised when we speak about the few simple steps of our asset creation process. Despite the common misconception that creativity can and should be messy, we win this game by maintaining a high-level of structure and organization.

With time, we've come up with detailed weekly production processes that determine the daily and hourly tasks of each team. By mimicking famous car manufacturers like Toyota, we work according to the "right the first time" principle and strive for flawless delivery, minimizing the number of issues that get past design release and cause rework after client feedback. Does this then stifle creativity? Absolutely not! What we have discovered so far is that even the craziest inventive minds need guidelines to move in the right direction and we give those directions by defining the playing field (copy, strategy, illustrators, [motion] graphics, AR) where our superheroes can unleash their creativity.

[1] Every weekly sprint starts with an ideation session with our clients. During these sessions, creative ideas are going back and forth, and we, along with our client, try to make sense together of sometimes fuzzy trends and how to utilize them in our process best. Together we decide what the creative format of the deliverables should be for the upcoming week (e.g., a chat flow video or a fake tweet still image).

[2] After the brainstorm, our creative strategist combines three crucially essential factors: the weekly brainstorm outcome, previously tested winning ads learnings, and client brand guidelines — to set the rules of the game for the week. In other words, this is when the directions [mentioned above] are being set. This is translated into a detailed brief for our creative team, made up of copywriters and designers.

[3] The first group—the copywriters—are usually the ones who take on the new weekly briefs and generate the fun and catchy lines that you know and love us for. With the help of the brief, they know in which exact area they have to operate, but within that, we give them complete freedom to have their creativity wander. The only criteria set is that what they write-up matches the client's creative style and tone of the voice. Of course, we align with the client on the final copy, always intending to get it signed off immediately or to go from good to great.

[4] And when the asset copy is ready, along with the creative brief, it is transferred to our design team who bring the masterpieces to life. We have thousands of templates, generated by the design team prior, ready to use when creating the assets, making the process faster and more efficient.

And when the final assets are aligned and signed off by the client, our new weekly masterpieces are ready to go live the very same day on the paid social channels of choice. In the meantime, we prepare for the new sprint starting the next week and keep an active eye on trends in culture, social media and online vernacular that could be a good jump-off point for fresh, relatable copy, ahead of our next brief.

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