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At times, creative and production professionals probably feel like they're from separate universes, divided by a common language of specs, deadlines and mail dates.

Simply put, says John Brahm, president of Elmhurst IL-based agency Williams Kincaid Group, “they're two different groups of people.”

“In the agency world, creatives are trying to provide the best possible product or campaign for the client,” he says. “Not that production doesn't agree with that, but the motivation tends to be a little different. We're trying to figure out ways to get the package opened and responded to. In the production world, the end result is as important, but their real objective is [that] somebody has created something and they have to produce it.”

The key to making the relationship work — for the vendors, agencies and, most importantly, the clients — is good communication.

“The most important part of the process is making sure not only that those guys are communicating but that I'm in the loop as well and we've managed to figure out a process to do that,” says Meghan Tracy, marketing manager for executive education at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, IL.

The 4,500-student executive education program includes a two-year executive MBA curriculum, 37 open enrollment non-degree programs and customized courses for various businesses. It mails between 1 million and 1.5 million pieces annually and is a client of Williams Kincaid and W.K.'s sister company, Diamond Marketing Services.

Greg Waite, president of production services for Bloomingdale, IL-based Diamond, notes that creatives sometimes come up with great ideas but don't always check with production to see what's feasible.

“They'll design a piece that doesn't necessarily meet postal specs or doesn't work quite right with the machines we have,” he says. “A piece comes in and we're expected to mail it in the normal turnaround but it doesn't run well on our machines because they designed it funny.”

And in just about all cases, he adds, “the biggest issue is timing. ‘We need this turned around in a day, we need pricing in an hour, we need postal specs.’ Everything is we need it, we need it, we need it now.”

Waite says he thinks Diamond and Williams Kin-caid have done a good job of figuring out how to work around those issues. Since the agency was acquired last year by Diamond, the two groups got past an initial bumpy patch to form a good relationship.

“We work really closely with them,” says Waite. “We have conference calls with them three days a week — Monday, Wednesday and Friday — and our client services team works with theirs. They go through every job, where it's at, what's going on and what's on the horizon. It's pretty exhaustive, to take three or four people from each company and spend an hour or two every other day, but it seems to help dramatically. You need to give people a chance to talk about what the issues are going to be.”

“On the lettershop, mailing and fulfillment [side], there tends to be a lot of peaks and valleys in scheduling,” says Kincaid's Brahm. “There's nothing going on this week, but next week I've got 10 million pieces I've got to get out because everything's been delayed. So scheduling is important, especially for the production people. The agency people don't always consider that. We do, but we're still trying to keep our ball rolling.”

“The lettershop is the last stop in the chain and usually everybody has used up all the free time and extra time with alterations and modifications as we go into the creative level,” he continues. “Then at the production level, we're eating up some time in printing and by the time we get to the last guy, there's not a lot of time left to make that mail date. And many times that mail date has been determined months in advance based on a marketing strategy, whether it's the holidays or retail trying to get something in Thanksgiving week or something like that. By the time we've gotten down to the lettershop level, we're given one week to do it. And we know we're late. So scheduling gets tough.”

Conflicts between production and creative are natural, said Brahm. “You tend to have different levels of importance on things like scheduling and production issues; types of paper; graphic images; what can, can't, should and shouldn't be done — that kind of thing.”

Direct mail and print are the primary marketing tools for Kellogg's executive education program, which accounts for 45% of the school's annual revenue, says Eric Fridman, director of marketing for executive education.

The program primarily targets executives with five to 20 years' experience. They might want a refresher course in a topic they studied when getting an MBA or to learn about a subject they've never been formally trained in, says Fridman. He adds that many students have new jobs or responsibilities and need to get up to speed in certain skills.

Many students' tuition is covered by their employers, says Tracy. Still, much of the marketing is aimed at the individual, who then goes to his or her boss with the information. The school is researching the role of human resources in the education process, she adds.

Print ads run regularly in business publications like The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review and Business Week. Online, ads are placed on those publications' Web sites, as well as that of U.S. News & World Report.

The school is moving toward more e-mail marketing as it improves its internal data hygiene processes, says Fridman. “We expect to be significantly increasing use of permission-based e-mail within the next 12 months.”

Kellogg's executive education division drops mailings pretty consistently, as programs are offered a few times each calendar year, says Tracy.

Mailings are done six months ahead of a program's start, with most pieces consisting of a brochure in an envelope with a letter. Postcards are used both as “save the date” pieces and follow-up reminders.

The school does several versions of each piece, depending on the target audience. Letters are personalized with the individual's name; each round of mailings consists of descriptions of eight to 10 programs and then each program has multiple versions.

“There are lots of different pieces involved,” says Tracy. “We've worked through some little glitches here and there. It runs fairly smoothly at this point.”

One recent problem occurred with an international mailing which used a No. 10 window envelope.

“As we started in the process, we realized that some of the international addresses — some seven lines long — were not going to fit in the window of the envelope,” says Tracy. “It was something we didn't necessarily think about at the time because we don't typically mail in No. 10s, so it came up as we were mid-process. The creative and the production folks were able to work together to figure out a solution so we didn't have to reprint envelopes or anything. We used the envelopes we had ready to go, adjusted the font size and took out some things that weren't important to have in that address block, like the individual's title. It was able to fit and look nice and didn't appear as if something had gone wrong. The teams worked closely to keep things on track.”

Weekly status meetings and frequent quality control checks along the way keep everybody up to speed, she says, so problems like this are caught before they become major issues. Tracy stresses that having a single main point of contact at Kincaid helps streamline the process, so she doesn't have to deal with several people to get a picture of how things are going. “It seems to be very seamless, at least in my eyes as a client.”

“We as a company have created ways to communicate better because we're a partner,” says Kincaid's Brahm. “We're designing, creating…we're in a sense printing and mailing. And we've got to make sure at the agency level we're communicating our steps and what's happening, what regulations have changed — what's happened that's going to affect them down the road.”

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Greg Waite and John Brahm are scheduled to present “Creative Is From Mars/Production Is From Venus” at 2 p.m. on April 7 at Chicago Direct Marketing Days. Meghan Tracy will present “How to Do Guerilla Marketing” April 8 at 10 a.m.