While we work with a lot of very experienced teams around the world on digital experiences, activations and web-experiences, we work with just as many teams who aren’t regularly doing digital. For those clients, it can be daunting, and there is a lot of information out there that may or may not apply to you and your current situation for B2B and experiential marketing (and plenty of other scenarios, really). Here are 5 regularly consistent points that come up that can save a lot of time, heart-ache, and can seem like a magic wand waving over a project to get it to the finish line efficiently.

The Top 5 Things to Have Prepared

1 of 5:  Privacy Policy / Terms & Conditions / Cookie Policy – “The Legalese,” as they say

• Ensuring you have your legalese i’s crossed and t’s dotted is about the easiest thing you can get the ball rolling on early, and stay ahead of launching your website or experience. It is way more exciting to see your designs coming together, and playing around with the staging link and doing QA – it just feels like you are making progress and checking off tasks left and right. 
• But once we get right to the finish line, and the Privacy Policy isn’t ready, or the Terms & Conditions aren’t there, or a fully approved Cookie Policy isn’t sourced (assuming we aren’t the ones providing that), everything comes to a screeching halt and those seatbelts engage in full force. Youch!
• So, as soon as you know you are doing a website, whether it is a simple landing page, a small interactive, a web AR experience, start getting these 3 things in motion and approved so that once QA is all done and the kit and kaboodle is ready to launch, you get to roll right into that launch and start cheersing some butter beer.

2 of 5:  The Right People in the Room

• Nothing is more disappointing than working on an activation that is ready to go live and have some stakeholder who was not included come in and shut the whole thing down, or introduce nearly insurmountable hurdles in the final hour. Sadly, this happens despite our best efforts to avoid this, even after establishing processes to hedge against this.
• Some questions to ask as you get into a digital project or activation to help grease the wheels:
  • Who from the IT team do we need to include in this discussion/project during production to make this as smooth as possible?
  • Who has the veto authority over this project and any of its deliverables? How can we include them at the right times?
  • Is this the kind of project that the legal team needs to review? If yes, then get a debrief meeting set asap and get the guardrails defined.
  • Who from the Brand Management team needs to be included, or the Creative Directors who will have final say on look/feel? They need to be included at the outset of any interactive experience.

3 of 5:  Brand Guides and Approved Assets (and the right file types!)

• This is one of the first questions we ask when collaborating with an existing brand/IP/company when we are engaged to design an experience. True to having the right people in the room, if we aren’t starting with the right material, things get derailed and potentially shut down. 
• Every now and again, we encounter a brand/company that doesn’t have a fully fleshed out Brand Guide, or even a curated library of assets that is central to an organization. In these scenarios, lots of questions and check-ins with the Right People in the Room helps to smooth over any potential hangups this can introduce. 
• Similar to the Brand Guide, what are the approved assets that can be used, or the content that will be implemented into an experience? Who owns them, and are they in a sharable location with our team? This conversation can get started even before signing an SOW with us, and can be refined during a kickoff call so that any and all assets that could be used are prepped and ready for us to run with by the time we get to design.
• Now, the prep part of approved assets is potentially a much longer conversation, but a few quickies to pre-heat the cauldron:
  • In the digital world, we are often trying to work with the largest versions possible, and then we can scale them down. Like a haircut, you can always take hair away, you can’t add it back.
  • Vector art is what we prefer for brand assets. 
  • Powerpoint is not a design file…
  • Videos can be compressed/optimized on our end, but it is always helpful if they are compressed for us prior to implementation.

4 of 5:  Necessary Access for Integrations

• Almost all the web experiences we build have some degree of 3rd party integrations. Whether it is analytics through our partner’s/client’s accounts, CRM integration, or a career embed, we often need to have access to the platforms we are integrating to effectively implement and then test. 
• For our much larger clients, they have procedures that need to followed to allow either the proper access or the proper permissions to be able to set up the integrations, i.e. API integrations.
• One workaround for this for some integrations is to set them up for our clients and pass them over/migrate them to our clients upon launch. That said, the note about procedures/permissions applies, and this approach can’t work for the majority of the integrations we work with.

5 of 5:  PII – Who’s Responsible

• We work in a lot of different industries, and one thing that is consistent across all industries is respecting PII and everything associated with it. For example, there have been quite a few pharmaceutical projects we have worked on where they strictly do not collect any contact information.