Creative Agency Secrets

A topic I’ve been mulling for a while is whether it’s possible to do "opensource" as a business model for creative agencies.

As is my wont, I’ll try the ideas out on a couple of agency bosses as I meet them during my normal line of work.  I have just had the first positive response to the suggestion.

My thesis, is that every agency says they are "creatively led" and "innovative" and "ideas-led".  But in practice, each one is very like any other.  A very few lead the field in creativity and innovation and the broad mass are followers. 

The broad mass are still very good at what they do, don’t mistake me.  But if you work for or own one of those agencies whose creative reputation is not yet as high a star as you hope it will one day become, how do you show the world how great you are at creative ideas?

The normal showcase you use is your client work.  But what if your client won’t let you run the best things you devise?  They choose the ’safe’ campaign.  Well, you use pitches as another opportunity to show off your talents.  And if you win the pitch - all well and good [but frequently the client still won’t let you run the really creative campaign you favour].

So what if you lose the pitch?  Well, there’s a fabulous document detailing all your best ideas for this particular brief sitting on a shelf in the office.

Here’s what I say

PUBLISH IT.

Here’s why

• if you are creative, it will show through
• You can then allow others to compare your work to the campaign the client finally ran with the winning agency (does yours stack up?)
• Prospective clients can see your truly most creative stuff
• Competitors…ditto….

I now have a second stage to suggest.  Allow others to use your material - YES MAKE IT OPENSOURCE

• Use creative commons licenses
• Let anyone take your best stuff and use / adapt it for their own purposes
• Take the credit for originating
• Promote it as a point of difference for your agency
• Let prospective clients work out how good your stuff is by showing them and the public how great it really is

I expect a few side benefits

1. Improved recruitment
2. Some great B2B campaigns to promote your business
3. The industry newspapers will ignore it…. for a bit
4. Smaller agencies will declare their connection to your work and you will get exposure through their clients (who may grow and come and see you sometime)….

Roll up, roll up, read all about it. Stephen Waddington of tech PR company, Rainier PR, seems to think I may have something worthwhile to suggest.

I have been invited to lead the ’surgery sessions’ in the Cambridge University Judge Business School summer programme. 

The Ignite Programme runs from 8th – 14th July 2007.  This week long intensive course brings together a blend of practical teaching sessions,expert clinics, experienced mentors and inspirational talks from leading entrepreneurs. 

I will be doing a surgery about business development, sales and marketing (with a bit of online / web 2 as well).  Here’s wat they expect to be asking about…

These newly designed sessions are intended to compliment the input given by our mentors.  After their work with the mentors, our delegates will still have issues and questions that they would like to explore with experts.

This is where the surgery providers come in.  Each surgery provider will give advice to 4 – 5 delegates.  There may be one business idea per delegate, or, in some cases, 2 or 3 delegates may have the same business idea.  To ensure that the session is well focussed we will provide details about the business ideas of the relevant delegates in advance so that contributors have some opportunity to prepare before the session.  Due to time constraints, we will also make sure that each delegate has narrowed down the issues that they would like to discuss so that they have a maximum of two questions/issues to ask about during the Surgery Session.

The delegates are a diverse mix of entrepreneurs, corporate innovators and students who want to investigate and prepare their innovations for a commercial environment. We are pleased to report  that we have currently received a record number of applications and have high calibre delegates booked from UK, Spain, India, Japan, Latvia, USA, Germany and China so far this year.

(more…)

/how do you get your product listed when people are searching categories rather than for specific names or services?  I met Shivaun Raff from Foundem, the search engine, at the Geek Girl Dinner last week and she claims to have sorted this out for the busy consumer.

I have done some testing and passed it onto some clients to do too.
Findings so far

• It
  is straightforward

• Nice
  graphics

• Apple
  rather than PC “feel”

• Easy
  to use

• Quick
  results

• Different
  / broader range of results than other sites

Seems to work well for consumer products.  What’s next for B2B search?

Interesting how ideas develop simultaneously in different places at the same time.

Take a look at Xplane and compare it to my friend Tom Ball’s outfit Cognac the Big Picture Company

Cognac - Communicate anything in 10 minutes
Xplane - we use visual thinking to convey complex thoughts, ideas, processes and services

Neat.   Maybe they should hook up.