[Full disclosure: Mascola Group is the marketing partner for The Big E, the fifth largest fair in North America]

Should your next marketing campaign have a media driven creative strategy or a creative driven media strategy? The answer is: both.

Relevance has always been important in the world of advertising, and now, it is even more important – and more obtainable – than ever before. Today’s massive shift to digital advertising gives you the opportunity to put very targeted messages in front of people who are in exactly the right mindset to hear what your brand has to say.

While general brand awareness campaigns are still necessary (people can’t interact with your brand if they don’t know it exists), coming up with one simple brand message and blanketing it all over billboards, radio, and banner ads is simply not enough. Video pre-roll ads, retargeted banners, social media, and even digital billboards are just a few areas that allow brands to get more granular, effective, and relevant with their campaigns, often with highly measurable results.

Which is why you want your creative team and your media team in the same room together when campaign development first begins. There is no handoff of creative executions to a media group, and no force-fitting of the creative message into the medium. When everyone is around the table together, bouncing ideas off one another, magic happens.

Even traditional advertising can benefit from this relationship. As one of few boutique advertising agencies with both media and creative in-house, we see this happen all the time. Our Media Director finds out what kind of opportunities there are with a TV station, magazine, or website, and brings them to the creative team. Then the creative team suggests an alternate way to get the message across better, and the Media Director can go back to vendors with new ideas when it’s time to negotiate – they usually welcome creative use of advertising space with open arms.

Media and Creative working under the same roof makes for a much more nimble marketing approach – a huge advantage for brands who want to get the most value for their campaign dollars.

So before you launch your next big campaign, make sure you’re working with an agency that maximizes your media dollars, not just with make-goods and negotiation skills, but with creative use of each and every channel.