Fresh Creative Communication Starts with the Right Partners
My red-headed, Irish-Scottish grandmother made a fresh-baked pie each morning from scratch. These delectable acts of creation and self-expression stood on a tiered pie stand in the corner of her kitchen counter. The newest pie of the day was featured on top, with the partially eaten, day-old pies moved to the lower tiers. It was considered acceptable (if not downright encouraged) that one could enjoy a pie like Fresh Strawberries and Sweet Cream or Peanut Butter Brittle for any occasion, including breakfast, as an anytime-snack or even as a meal.
Grandma Violet’s joy was to create pies that surprised and delighted us. Her formula for success: start with something fresh, apply genuine work effort, craft with heart-felt intention, and as she ended each recipe card, “add a pinch for luck.”
Many brands want to produce marketing messages in a similar way. But despite exploding options in digital media channels and brand engagement strategies, consumers feel inundated with too much – and are left with a loss of appetite. The trick and challenge for many brands is to identify the right advertising agency talent — before the acts of creating fresh brand expression can even begin.
Too Many Bakers
According to Agency Spotter, there are over 120,000 agencies in the US and a half a million worldwide, counting agencies across all communication disciplines. They are populated with talented people who live to create; they are most inspired by marketing challenges with meaning and purpose.
Despite its digital evolution, the future of the advertising agency industry remains bright! Growing companies continue to see value in their advertising agencies as the source of creativity and innovation. And struggling companies often seek a change of strategy to solve their problems.
Our consulting clients engage us to find advertising agency talent for three primary reasons:
- their diverse but relevant external perspective
- their additive creativity and problem-solving skills and
- their inherently collaborative team-based cultures
The Secret Ingredient
So, who gets the gig— and gets to start producing something delicious? Finding the right mix of talent can be daunting. Engaging and empowering this external talent to produce innovative and brand building work is also challenging.
Hiring the best agency resources requires a different sourcing strategy, and an orientation to core values. You may be the most efficient, knife-wielding sushi artist around, but if we’re after hand-crafted, custom-designed pie crusts – we’re not meant to work together!
Not only does it help you find advertising agency talent, but selecting suppliers based on alignment of core values ensures organizational compatibility that underpins a successful relationship to come. It also informs and impacts work quality, creative output and brand performance. The intentional conversation about our principles and core values, i.e., the how and why we work together, is empowering for teams of diverse professionals. It allows people inside and outside the organization to feel the most engaged, inspiring creativity for the projects and tasks at hand.
What’s Your Signature Recipe?
Given the sea of choices for companies hiring advertising agencies, it behooves ad agencies to retire chameleon –like sales behaviors and better clarify their value proposition to attract the right clients. For example, showcasing circumstantial case history work done for other people reveals little, and rarely differentiates one agency choice from another. Agencies often wonder what to say or share, often falling short of telling prospective clients what they really desire to know.
A focus on the client-agency working relationship to come, with a discussion of core values, principles of operating, defined work ethic and distinctive organizational culture will serve to amplify any advertising agency’s core intellectual capital and design capabilities.
Another Helping
The undertaking of creating anything new that surprises and delights others is always worth doing. It allows us to grow, to serve and to make an impact. Companies that seek to find advertising agency talent can do so successfully when they choose partners that share their core values and understand their sense of purpose.
Inspired creativity results from great partnerships. Highly engaged teams of diverse people make quality brand communications that audiences will actually savor.
And if we are a tad lucky, this expression of creativity will be as delectable as Grandma Violet’s Irish Cream Celebration Pie.