In the office, every piece works. The key visual is full screen, in the right light, with the label up front and nobody walking past it. We reject or approve, roll it out, export and move on to the next one.

The problem is that almost nobody will see that piece that way. It will show up in a pharmacy aisle, among twenty competing brands. Or for one second in the feed of someone who wasn't even looking for supplements. The more time we spend away from those places, the easier it is to create for our own screen.

That's why we started taking the creative team out of the room.

What the store shows

We set up a cycle of store visits with the trade marketing team, who know that territory every day. The point of sale, which we are used to looking at whenever we go to stores and markets, ends up telling us a different reality when the purpose of the visit is technical. Observing competitors, behaviors and dynamics is hard to simulate when it isn't done on site.

Something else stands out: the sales dynamic between seller and customer. Watching one of those conversations, something interesting came up: customers always ask how much that product costs on the website. In other words, it's increasingly hard to separate the real from the virtual. Both spaces blend at the moment of a sale, which further supports the need for consistency between online and offline channels.

What the data from people who see it at scale shows

The shelf is one reality. The feed is another, and there our eye also deceives us.

At Meta Day Creative, we received direct analysis of our campaigns and creatives from people who look at performance at scale every day. It was one of those days that pull you out of your comfort zone, because it made the team rethink what it took for granted. For example, today it's easy to think of media as a visual rollout of the campaign, and it works. But variety of format and content is increasingly important in a world of extremely diverse consumer behavior. Sometimes a static piece that might work really well for me won't work for others. The lesson is that social media algorithms are increasingly able to insert ads subtly into our digital lives.

At Google, I spent a morning looking at what to apply for Black Friday. What I took back to the team was a process change: stop rolling out pieces for the sake of it and build each item of the asset set with a specific goal. Written like this it seems obvious. In the rush of production, it's easy to go on autopilot and repeat the formula that has always worked.

Each channel has its own truth

What I keep learning is that there isn't just one reality. The person at the pharmacy, the one scrolling the feed and the nutritionist who receives our material at the clinic are in completely different moments, even when we're talking about the same product. Once you see that up close, it's hard to treat everything as a single rollout in several sizes.

Certainty is different from taste

When the team goes into the field, the conversation at approval time changes. Before, defending a direction was more like “I think it looks better this way.” Now we can say where the piece will be, who will pass by it and what that person is doing at that moment.

This doesn't remove risk or replace the idea. A good idea still takes courage. But it comes from firmer ground, and the designer stops guessing.

How to start

You don't need a big program. You can pick a channel, arrange it with the area that looks after it and go with the whole team, not just the leadership. The best part is making it a space where everyone learns together.