Is innovation really innovation when it’s all fluff and no substance?
You can talk the talk about being an ‘innovative’ agency, but unless you have the tools and concrete actions to back up your words, it’s (let’s face it) just bad marketing. You need to be solving a problem, need innovation needs to be actionable.
Every year on Shrove Tuesday, Spitalfields hosts a pancake relay race in Dray Walk at the Old Truman Brewery.
Originality is overrated.
It’s common to think that in order to be cutting-edge, to be at the top of your game and foremost in your field, you need to be original. But in reality, this just isn’t true. You can have something completely original and it is just as completely useless. Furthermore, it’s extremely rare to come up with something truly ‘original’. Much of what we do and believe is due to the culture we have grown up in, and we can never completely remove ourselves from our experiences.
Like authenticity, transparency is one of those terms that is so important and should be highly valued in any organisation– yet it ironically is so difficult to grasp due to its often-esoteric nature and broad interpretation. Everyone ‘wants’ transparency, but it’s not all that easy to achieve, and there isn’t necessarily a clear-cut path to get there. (Not to mention that because it is a buzzword in most companies, it inevitably causes an internal groan and your eyes to glaze over at the phrase). And all of this is before mentioning the ANA media transparency report released last year calling out the unethical practices of media agencies. But do not fear– we are here to redeem transparency, and hopefully provide insight on how to implement it in daily life.
The arrangement between a client and an agency is like a relationship. Seriously.
For a digital agency, we go through a lot of paper.
There is just something about physically writing ideas down, about mapping out your customer’s digital journey, printing it out, pasting it to the wall, and scribbling all over it. We are diehard advocates of taking the intangible and embracing the physicality of it before sending it back out into the digital stratosphere. Why?
There is so much more to creating a driven and positive company culture than regulations and meetings. You can have all the systems in place, deadlines, incentives, regular break times and pizza nights. But if the vision of what you are doing and why you are working isn’t there, if it is not ingrained into your work, providing perspective and drive, then when the going gets tough, or boring, or dry, the goer will grind to a halt (or at least downshift to a snail’s pace).
