Note To Ad Agencies: Learn from South Park
People who develop innovative ideas often work in innovative ways. No shit, right? But think about it. It often takes a different way of working to develop big ideas, not just a eureka! moment.
Take ad agencies, for instance. Most of them are proud of their creative environments but are still working in ways that might not make for the Punkest Marketing solutions. A creative team is briefed by an account guy or planner or whatnot and then goes off in a huddle for a few weeks to come up with ideas. The problem with that is a two-person team, over familiar with working with one another, may not be pushing through their own comfort zone. They come up with work that starts looking tired and familiar because, well, they are tired and familiar.
Then look at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky and how its creative process - one we call ‘Democratic Creativity’ in our book - involves many more teams jamming together until the good ideas rise to the top and, under the guidance of the creative director, they build upon these ones until some truly great ideas emerge. Ones that are so unexpected they knock you sideways.
There is an interesting company in South Park, San Francisco, that is also using a collaborative rather than a silo-based approach to problem solving. They have developed a product that is causing quite a buzz among the Silicon Valley money men. The company is called Obvious Corp, and the product is Twitter. Twitter is a way to broadcast short messages on cell phones to large groups of people. Apparently it is strangely addictive and has attracted tens of thousands of users (60,000 or so as of last week), including presidential hopeful John Edwards. One simple question that is at the core of Twitter gives friends a glimpse into one another’s lives: “What are you doing?” The answers can range from the mundane to the ridiculous to the downright hilarious.
According to a March 19th article in the San Francisco Chronice, Obvious Corp. has been experimenting with ‘co-working’, in which likeminded companies share office space and ideas. Once a month they convene a Company Chow Fun, a meeting at which a dozen local tech firms get together over food to brainstorm solutions to their problems. While we wouldn’t recommend ad agencies all club together to develop creative ideas for their respective clients, bringing outsiders in as part of the problem-solving process to shake up the comfortable old solutions is something we definitelty would.
One problem Obvious Corp. might soon have could be how to spend the millions of dollars they will make from selling Twitter to NewsCorp or Viacom or Yahoo! or Google, or whoever else thinks it will be the Next Big Thing
