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.

Nearly every website launch I have witnessed and / or been involved in is LATE.  Some VERY LATE.
Here’s a new trick to ensure you launch on time.

Public humiliation + embarrassment + fear of failure = near-guaranteed success or commercial suicide

Take a look at WAA the creative advertising agency’s site….it is the classic holding page… with a difference.

New Website Coming 4th June 2007

Can’t wait!

Thanks to the boys at Web Liquid for their insightful and blissfully short post on Consumer Generated Content.

Key thoughts
1.  Among the many points of difference between the broadcast and online
models of marketing is the notion of service over solicitation.

We are here to serve you the customer or potential customer.  We aren’t trying to sell you stuff.

Question for your business…. online can your customers find out about your service, product, ask questions in public and get timely, accurate answers.

As an agency, what could I put up to enable this for my website? 

• How we treat our clients,
• Our service level commitment to our clients,
• What happens when you are not happy with our work or our service,
• Public places for new brand ideas - got an idea for our clients’ brands? Post it up and come and work with us as job experience to put it into practice (we pay you if your idea grabs our client),
• Ideas we have pitched and failed on - but we still think are good ideas.  Help yourself - but please credit us under creative commons license.

2. CGC presents a valuable research opportunity CGC is Word-of-Mouth
but online it’s also a public record of those conversations and
consumer sentiment relative to your brand and that of your competitors.

An ideal point-in-time temperature gauge of your brand and its relationship with key audiences.  What could your agency be doing in this area?

• online poll of viewpoints - latest campaign, cool employees, what the MD said at a conference, hiring policies, graduate training scheme,
• If you are only as good as your last campaign - how is that measured and reported on?  By competitors, by clients, by staff?
• What was the killer reason you won your last pitch?  Be brave and publicise.
• Looking for a brave brand on which to exercise your talents - ask for small brands to challenge your creative juices - the deal is they run with one of the campaign ideas you have and you use it to showcase a new service / new approach / new or young team

3.  CGC presents the opportunity to engage customers and potential
customers at the most critical time in the purchase process - right
when they’re looking for the information about a product or service.

• How to find a brand when they are looking for an agency?  Get known as the place that posts up ideas which others’ can take and use as long as they credit you.  See David Airey who regularly posts business card ideas
• it’s more than testimonials, it is the real grit of the day to day work that should shine through and be available to be seen.
• Post up questions that you WANT clients and prospects to ask you.  Really Hard Questions.  And have some honest answers ready.  Extend that playing field onto your territory.

4.  For a brand to engage in this conversation with a strategic approach
including a deep understanding of what’s being discussed online and its
influence, there is a great opportunity to more effectively reach
qualified consumers and position the brand as an authority on the topic.

So there you go.  It is possible for an agency to do this.  Who’s gonna be first, guys?

Charlie Hoult sends me an email after I publish the Web 2.0 research

Thanks for this.

The report is a very accomplished piece of work - only lacking a quote from me.

And so here’s what he wrote about it on the Brand Karate blog
But because it’s password protected, I’ll reproduce the whole text below.  Shame that some great bloggers are hidden from the world they need to be capturing as an audience by only being hosted on one media site that’ password protected. 

(more…)

Many agencies have used Rebus the integrated timesheet, accounts and cost management system.  The makers have re-written the software and called it "Paprika".  Launched November 06, it is a bit smarter than the previous system, has pretty graphics but is fundamentally intuitive and looks quite easy to use.

Key, of course, to a successful installation is
1/  Specify the system properly
2/ Have clear processes (and use them)
3 / Manage the change actively

I saw a demo online and have taken it into two clients for consideration.

Worth a look.

Would like to know what others think.

Here’s what I do for a living.  I work with creative businesses who want to grow and make money.  Sometimes I introduce them to new ideas and techniques (from Board Meetings to blogs) to help them along the path they are treading. 

Frequently, I find I cannot push a client to do what they don’t want to do (or won’t trust me to do).  It ends up in a half-hearted attempt to do something that ultimately fails as they move quietly back to doing things within their comfort zone and experience no change at all. [See posts from March compared to other dates.  I failed to make a change happen.]

When it works, it’s great.  Year End with a client this week; profits up £100k, margins up nearly 10%… happiness and another year to work together. 

Here’s what Adriana does…

The way corporate life works is that change needs to come from the
top down, as well as the bottom up. Feverish activity in the middle is
at risk of being wasted."

Yes, and yes again. I see change as a laborious and slow building of
a momentum (finding the genie and the neck of the bottle), which must
be based on the understanding that you CANNOT change a system from
within. What you can do is build a parallel alternative
system/process/network with the notion of bypassing the existing one.
Do this by doing things that work i.e. small projects under the radar,
borrowing the motivation and dynamics for them from the
internet…(tools, autonomy, simplicity). Then stand back and watch the
bad bits of the company and its culture fight it. Whenever I get this
far with my clients and the change to their companies, it always
involves getting them into their discomfort zone. There is no ’safe’
way of doing this. Think of it as a controlled implosion.

I also know what Hugh means, small things/changes can impact even a
big entrenched system but generally they tend to be too minute and
therefore too fragile. Occasionally they start a snowball or tap into
something bigger and cause a fundamental shift. This however does not
offer companies much consolation as it cannot be easily understood, let
alone replicated.

The change may be driven by people from within a system (and yes,
they have to be at the top as well as bottom) but they really have to
understand that they can’t use the system and its dysfunctional process
to change it. There is too much resistance and by the time they crack
it, the outside world has overtaken the company by a long way. And that
is no route to innovation.

In my experience, the people who become part of change I try to
bring to companies have what I call an ‘oh fuck it’ moment. They have
tried to use the approved processes, implement tools and generally do
things by the book. They run against a wall and attitudes that firmly
hold it in place. When they realise this - it’s time for ‘oh fuck it, I
am going to do this anyway’. And that’s when we get really started.

So come hear her speak about this (and other things…..30 May, 2007.  Breakfast.)