Creative Agency Secrets

Dan is the Head of Business Development for FHD, a design agency and part of AMV/Omnicom.

He’s done a fabulous job taking the company slowly online as part of a suite of things he has implemented for his business development role.

1.  Salesforce.  Good move.  First thing he did when he joined.
2.  C level reporting line.  Great planning by FHD.  He reports to Adrian and Robert - MD and Creative Director.  As it should be.  Biz Dev is so important that you can’t afford to let it go below this level of radar.
3.  "e-presence".  His word.  Driving a new brand (launched the rebrand 11.06) with a brief to make it known as a design business with personality, improve FT listing of top 20 places to work and a fun place.  He has launched an internal blog (censored!!!) and a public ‘forum’, explicitly not a blog!.  They are using LInked in, Facebook and pay per click….newsletters still to come.

Good practice.  Copy what he’s done and you will be fine for starters if you are in Biz Dev for an agency.

We had some ideas for collaboration…. more to come on that.

And I got onto my soapbox about publishing creative work that clients don’t buy.  Whether it’s a pitch you lost or a design that isn’t chosen.  Why not use it to show off your creativity?

Every agency describes itself as creatively led or an ideas agency.  So show off what you have got.  Use creative commons licensing to get credit for the source.  Let others see how good you are en route to the end design not just "da darrr - here it is the new logo for xyz co". 

We nearly agreed…. on some points.

Here we are …. thanks Joanna and Alex for passing by with the camera!

Dan’s own blog What’s the Beef just for the private ‘angle’!

PS nice link-up with Alex Pearmain who commented on my rowing blog and found me online…. thought he’d introduce me to Dan, his boss, and found Dan already knew my work! Neat.  That’s how it’s supposed to work.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Blogging, Creative Business, Customer Relationship Management, Sales, Web 2.0 for business, business development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.