Creative Development Process for Agency
03-1013516-841

Our creative process is a by-product of our agency culture. We believe
in small groups of seasoned leaders working together in a partnership.
We emphasize focus, simplification, and original thought throughout the
process of solving client problems.

We believe that a smart, passionate team with a reasonable amount of
time and the proper inputs can create truly original and impactful
solutions for most problems. We don’t believe in formulaic, proprietary
processes that promise the optimal solution if you simply follow each
step. We apply due rigor in the process of defining the problem to
solve. We also value the experience and intuition of the team members
and encourage them to trust their gut.

We engage clients in our process. We respect the intimate understanding
of their business situation that can only come from the client
perspective. We will only be effective if we have our clients’ input
and direct, honest feedback throughout the process. We find it
critically important that the decision makers in the client
organization are involved directly with our team. Setting a clear
vision and mustering the courage to embrace a truly new approach are
not often the strong suits of middle management. Likewise, clients have
access to the core agency team as opposed to channeling all dialogue
through a single contact.

Given our appetite for simplification, it’s not surprising that we have
a fairly straight-forward process with four steps that correspond to
four questions:

1. Why are we doing this? Why is the client retaining our services?
What is the root problem we can solve? What action in the marketplace
could make the biggest impact on the client’s business? We tend to ask
a lot of hopefully smart and occasionally challenging questions.

2. What idea has the greatest chance of changing perceptions, behavior,
or motivating action? The idea can be an idea we want the target to
associate with the brand or it can be a new way of going to market. We
seek ideas with the power to engage the target in an age where they
have the power to bypass and ignore a lot of what’s thrown at them.

3. Where will this idea have the biggest impact on the consumer? Once
we have the idea nailed (and the client is on-board), we work to
determine the best way to connect that idea with the target audience.
This is a collaboration between traditional media, interactive and
direct response experts (in addition to the core creative, account and
planning team members). The group considers multiple scenarios for
engaging and interacting with our audience. In general, we believe
“interrupting” the target and forcing them to absorb our message is
less effective than “engaging” them to interact or participate. We
consider the reality that we cannot script the sequence or even context
of many brand communications and as such need to provide mechanisms for
people to navigate across messages in their own manner, in a measurable
way.

4. How do we execute the idea in the most original way? This part of
our business has not changed dramatically over the years. It’s about
creating compelling, original ways to stop and engage the target. One
departure from tradition is our belief in concepting across disciplines
simultaneously. An interactive writer and art director may work
side-by-side with a team concepting a TV spot Ð ideally
cross-pollinating the other’s output. This approach requires a greater
level of trust and partnership but yields a campaign experience that is
seamless and conceptually united.

One way our process differs from traditional agencies is that we insist
on having a pretty good idea of when and where we’ll connect with
consumers (step 3) prior to beginning the actual creative process (step
4). We’ve found it relatively impossible to create genuinely media
agnostic solutions without figuring out the contact plan prior to
execution.