Photo: Lukas Riebling
For many months I’ve been planning a visit to an advertising agency, and on Monday it finally happened. My hypothesis was that if any industry is in the business of creating ideas, then advertising is the industry. And I was keen to see how they do it.
I’ve no idea if agencies usually open their doors to outside observers like me, but on this occasion I was able to call in a favour. And I’m very glad I did …
The agency in question was “Gyro”, one of the larger multi-nationals with around 600 staff around the world. And what better agency to visit, given their mission to create “ideas which ignite emotions”?
My initial impressions just served to underline the stereotype: The London office is in Chelsea Harbour, amidst dozens of other companies from the creative industries; and scooters and bubblegum machines littered the reception area, which was almost exactly what I expected.
After the first five minutes though, Gyro began to confound my expectations.
I was met by Pete, the Creative Director, who nevertheless seemed extremely down-to-earth. He doesn’t live in Bloomsbury; he doesn’t wear a monocle; he doesn’t keep two pipes in his breast pocket, and he doesn’t ride a unicycle to work.
The second surprise was the immediate offering-up of a creative process. I’d expected that I would have to eke-out some semblance of a process by observing an amorphous mass of arty activity. But instead, Pete talked me through Gyro’s method within the first few of minutes. In my Sherlock Holmesy gusto to discover-that-which-is-hidden, I was almost disappointed.
Apparently Gyro’s process is not so different from that used in other agencies, and it certainly bears a striking resemblance to the sequence immortalised in James Webb-Young’s 1939 classic: A Technique for Generating Ideas. I’ll paraphrase the steps here, to avoid revealing too much of Gyro’s hand …
1. Define the question
2. Generate large numbers of raw ideas
3. Assess those ideas against the brief
4. Elaborate the promising ones, and reform or abandon the rest
5. Reflect
You might easily identify with steps 1 to 4. Even to the untrained eye they seem perfectly sensible, whereas step 5 feels like a luxury. In fact Pete was keen to point out the importance of step 5: If we don’t sleep on an idea, we can too easily get carried away with a seductive idea which is actually unworkable.
So if Gyro follows a similar process to other agencies, how does it differentiate in a crowded market? Pete gave me several views on this, but the most striking was the way Gyro tackles step 2. Whereas some other agencies assign small teams to work through all the steps, Gyro uses its large size to draw more staff into the generation of ideas. In some instances, it is even able to draw the entire company in. When 600 creative people cluster around a client’s problem I expect the results can be pretty mind-blowing (in fact I've already seen some evidence of this!)
The next step on my tour was a meeting to discuss a new client brief. I keenly watched the way the team discussed the details of the advertising problem, but restrained themselves from discussing specific ideas there and then. Instead, they went away individually for two days to come up with simple pictoral representations (“Scamps” or “Tissues”) of large numbers of ideas. I guess this behaviour is the advertising equivalent of de Bono’s Yellow Hat – a way of avoiding the kind of early criticism which can kill excellent ideas unless they’re already well-articulated.
I made my own small contributions to the Art Director after the meeting. He wrote three of them down, but I guess the odds are against me. The quality and quantity of his own ideas will almost certainly overwhelm mine, but I’ll keep an eye-out just in case anything of mine sees the light of day. (I won’t share my ideas here, partly because of client confidentiality … but more importantly to save embarrassment!)
After lunch I interviewed James, the Art Director working on the brief. I was keen to find out what he’d be doing in the next two days.
Some of the observations from James (and Pete) reaffirmed my views on creativity:
- Working away from the office in a quiet environment is important.
- Everyone at Gyro is encouraged to broaden the collective knowledge of the company by doing something extracurricular – perhaps pursuing outside hobbies, or forging links to other companies.
- Brainstorming should be focused, facilitated and short! Nothing is “a bad idea” and - participants should be encouraged to build on each other’s thoughts.
- The only tools needed are pen and paper, but the internet is also useful for research.
- The team will have ideas kicking around in their minds almost continuously over the next two days.
So what would I most like to apply, back in the day-job?
Two things:
1. Mental Preparation: Advertising agencies have learn that they need to prepare clients to receive ideas. There’s even an industry publication from the “IPA” on this subject (more of which in a future posting). If I’m going encourage creative thinking in a non-creative industry, I think I need to work harder on readying the audience at the receiving end.
2. Time: Creatives at Gyro often get the luxury of spending hours or days working on nothing but ideas. This is one of the reasons why it looks easy. Other industries would baulk at this, considering it a waste of time, but actually this kind of commitment is necessary to hit on the best ideas, and it can be incredibly fruitful, more than repaying the investment.
A fantastic visit then, and well-worth my investment. Thanks to Pete and James at Gyro for making me feel like one of the team from the moment I walked in.
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