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Sure, some things never change, like the frustration of being runner-up in a pitch or the aggravation of having a great idea thumped on. In some years, most things don’t change much. 2011 was like that. But 2015 wasn’t. Everyone knows how advertising has changed this year – or to be precise – is changing. What has changed for the creatives holding advertising agency rudders, Candide McDonald asks.
Well, I suppose the biggest change in my adland world this year has been a geographical one. After 20 months in the Copenhagen office, I relocated to Stockholm to oversee the region creatively.
I’ve now lived in Jamaica, Trinidad, England, Australia, Denmark and Sweden in my relatively short time on this planet. Which, I suppose, makes me a Rasta, Limey, Viking who loves a prawn on the barbie.
And with that nomadic lifestyle comes the explosion of cultural diversities that feed your brain.
In the Nordics, one of the things that really stands out is some of the language, which has the power to send you into fits of giggles – or maybe it’s just my juvenile sense of humour. For instance: ‘fart’ means speed. Or how about a town called Middlefart? And ‘slut’, which means ‘the end’. Better yet, ‘slutspurt’, which means ‘end of sale’. Retail advertising suddenly has a whole new meaning for me. And ‘kok’ means ‘top chef’. At least when account management call me a complete and utter kok, it might not be such a bad thing.
On a more serious note, I’m like a kid in a candy store. Not only am I now based in one of the most creative cities in the world for advertising but I’ve also got a pickand- mix assortment of fantastic clients and a treasure chest of new creatives to work with. Slut.
Be brave. Creatively, this year has been my most successful year to date. I have rediscovered the power of courage, a measure I will now use in my work throughout 2016 and beyond.
Courage must exist in marketing communication. It’s a commercial and intellectual war out there! If we truly believe in
an idea, like a warrior believes in his cause, we should be ready to risk our lives for it. In this industry, risking one’s life means jeopardising one’s reputation, job, personal finances and business security. Determining how much courage your ideas need to bring them to life can improve their quality.
No bravery is required to run something familiar. You wouldn’t battle for your work to the point of resignation unless there was something particularly special about it, would you?
As ideas don’t just happen on their own, you need clients, partners and your team to also own the fight and risk everything
they have for it too. You will only inspire valour in others when you stop fearing fear yourself.
The Vangardist HIV+ issue almost didn’t happen. It almost didn’t happen a hundred times. The board, the PR team, the NGOs, the finance team, the journalists, the moralists, the activists, the account teams, the designers, the printers, the media company, and more advised me on a daily basis why we should not execute this idea.
It was only the creatives, my CEO and the client who never swayed. Through every doubt, I persevered and listened and never hesitated, adapted, smiled, collaborated, convinced and advanced.
My new measure clearly highlights a gap in the industry where audacious work is rare. I am excited to be more courageous
in both my professional and personal life. More importantly, I look forward to being motivated by others who make their own
brilliant creative stand.
Maybe it’s just that I’m getting a bit older, or that I’m just plain old, but this year I’ve become ever-inspired by the ideas of ‘the agency youth folk’. And I’m not talking hair ideas or elasticated pant ideas. Here, we promoted one of our young designers into the role of art director after a successful run at Award School, and that one seemingly small move has changed the mood of our department, including mine, in a very short period of time.
Bringing young guys and girls into a department has always been about injecting energy and new perspectives, but this generation of ad kids has something juniors of yesteryear (like me) didn’t have. An entire life spent in the digital world and a general disregard for authority and in turn, agency hierarchy.
These two things mean the days of juniors happily working on briefs that keep the agency lights on so they can learn the
trade, are over. They know more about digital than is humanly fair. They’ll openly question strategy. They want a legitimate shot at the best briefs. They’ll unapologetically drink the last beer in the fridge. And for what it’s worth, I love it and I love what it does for an agency, especially mine.
So, if there are any juniors out there looking for a run, run your 3/4 pants this way, we’re up for it.
From both Caldwell and Broekhuizen: The changing face of the creative department. If there were any shred of doubt left, it has been removed. Over the last few years, creative departments have changed. And 2015 saw that trend continue.
In a world with a thirst for innovation not seen since the industrial revolution, it’s no longer good enough for an agency to be good enough in the ‘communication business’.
Long gone are the days when our only task was to give a competitive edge to a product with market parity by building a stronger emotional connection with the consumer. Now, clients are building that emotional connection by solving consumers’ problems through utility. Utility we’re often expected to come up with and then differentiate.
Which means an agency’s competitive set has changed from traditional advertising agencies, to include media agencies, product designers, app creators, inventors, engineers, kick-starter programs, men tinkering in sheds; in fact anyone with any idea that can change the world.
In the last three months alone, we’ve visited three of our clients’ innovation labs. Each has put considerable resources behind a division whose sole purpose is to uncover consumer insights that lead to the development of products and programs – to make their customers’ interaction with their brand a better one.
These divisions are filled with clever people with different skill sets, who are full of clever ideas. And the more our insight divisions and creative folk collaborate, the better the results will be. But to do that, agencies need people with new skills, or current staff need to adapt. They say anyone can come up with an idea. That may be true. But that idea still needs to be brilliant.
I’m probably not the only one in this column to say the word. But at the risk of sounding unoriginal, here it is: content. In fact, I’m going to have to use it more than once. Because content continues to be behind most of the changes to the way we think and work.
Content is now a consideration even when producing work for traditional channels. How might we use our ad as content, what additional content might be captured in its creation, or how could content provide a deeper engagement with the campaign.
Content is driving our move from simply producing interesting advertising to producing ‘interesting’. That means exploring
stuff that inherently makes for interesting content like real world activations, new technologies, product innovation, blogs or useful things like apps.
Content sees us collaborating with all types of disciplines outside our industry and has us working in new ways with traditional partners like film companies. Content has us hiring our own in-house producers, camera operators and directors to supply the demand for fast, lower cost video.
Content has creatives within our agency making stuff with their own hands. Shooting stuff on their phones. Animating stuff themselves. And writing longer length scripts. Content has made us bigger and busier. Content challenges us daily with timings, budgets and its insatiable appetite for more.
Yep, content has a lot to answer for. But it isn’t always the right answer. It’s not always cheap. It doesn’t always work. And it’s certainly not always engaging. But it does continue to change us. And I can’t see that changing anytime soon.
Changing the engines while you’re still flying the plane. As a strategic branding and experience design business, the biggest change we’re seeing is how clients are adjusting to changing consumer, customer and stakeholder dynamics.
In every industry, from our B2B corporates to our consumer facing clients, this year we’ve been solving some very meaty brand architecture questions as companies move to future-proof and organise themselves around the new customer paradigms they’re faced with.
Taking the leap from doing nothing to doing something takes a mixture of foresight and bravery and these aren’t always at hand in a risk averse environment where shareholder dividends need to be protected. We’re at an interesting crossroads in Australia where businesses are having to adjust to outside influences and increased competition like never before.
A few things we’ve been telling our clients consistently are: no industry is safe from disruptive or more nimble business models, so playing it safe or being average is not an option. Experience drives advocacy, your brand is what you do, not what you say you do, so you can no longer rely on communicating your way out of a reputation problem.
Candide McDonald also heads creative news site.
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