It is valuable to have the development team familiar with the work of a company's advertising agency and PR firm. Now the communication goals and the audience of the project should be clearly defined on paper, along with the technical specifications of the target computer platform. Depending upon the project, the communication goals might be stated at this stage with a few sentences, or it could be supplemented with a fully developed written outline of the project's content. Many internal education, training, presentation and even sales and marketing projects have very little creative development. This stage is skipped or ignored.
Information is delivered in a plain, vanilla package.
This is one of the great weaknesses in the overall state of corporate interactive communications today. This is a brainstorming process, usually executed by a creative team, in which visual and verbal concepts are explored as possible ways to effectively frame the messages defined in step 1. The concepts will be developed with rough headline copy, initial designs, and possibly rough storyboards, too. A second and sometimes third round of creative development is presented to the client. The message and its creative development are refined and honed.