Posts tagged ‘Creative Department’
Creative Spaces
I popped into an Art Director friend’s agency leaving do last night and the conversation came round to the Perfect Creative Department Office Layout. The consensus of opinion was that the Perfect Creative Department would comprise:
- a main open plan area with hot desking style desks (with no dividers!) close together, music going, lots of inspiring stuff on the walls, people gathering round to look at stuff on macs, generally noisy with lots of banter
- quiet rooms for either just sitting and letting your brain slip into neutral for ten minutes or for when you really need to get your head down and work uninterrupted
- war rooms for pitches and big campaigns (comfy seats, room to work, scamps up on the walls) so the whole pitch team have ownership of the work and everyone can contribute and have a place to congregate
- everyone would have a locker on wheels for all their personal stuff which would be wheeled to wherever they chose to work
- A3 colour flatbed scanners (scan everything and you don’t need to keep the originals so less clutter), colour printers etc sprinkled about with a liberal hand
Have they missed anything?
Value added Planning
In yesterdays post, I said that there was a whole other post to come looking at when Planning can best add value to the creative process and when Planners should butt out and leave the Creatives to it. So here it is.
Marketing agencies would (and many do) function perfectly well without Planners. Ads would still leave the building on time, brochures would still get printed. So we have to add value to the creative process to justify our existence. But that doesn’t necessarily mean breathing down the necks of the creative team or insisting on writing every single creative brief ourselves.
It might mean working with account handlers to improve their brief writing skills or ensuring that the research is asking the right questions, trawling the internet for some speck of insight or sharing thinking with the media planner. In my opinion, anything I do that means that the final piece of communications is more effective is me doing my job properly.
I know that Scamp and Russell Davies have both posted on roughly this subject before, but I can’t for the life of me find their posts (if anyone can, please add a link to the comments section as I’d love to read them again).
