It’s time to look inward at how you are fostering innovation
In this guest post, Dr Amantha Imber discusses why disruption should be performed inside a company to ensure best practise and a positive culture before turning to the outside market.
Agencies’ primary purpose is to come up with creative solutions to their clients’ (marketing) problems. Creative energy is directed externally and often with good results.
As an outsider to the industry but through my role heading up the team that judges the Australian Financial Review’s Most Innovative Companies list, the elephant in the room is the lack of effort toward innovation directed internally into how agencies run and how they make money.
For the most part, agencies that have entered the list have described marketing innovations, but rarely do they talk about the changes they are making internally to disrupt their own business model and industry.
The basic business model behind an agency of fee for service or fee for campaign has remained largely unchanged in decades.
Sure, there have been some instances of doing things differently, such as Anomaly’s model of building its own brands and businesses. But within Australia these alternate business models are few and far between.
One reason I have observed for this lack of innovation is due to the absence of leaders deliberately thinking about how they can build a better and stronger culture of innovation – and thus failing to challenge the status quo internally.
Instead, leaders work under the assumption that because we are a ‘creative’ agency, we don’t need to work on proactively making it better but instead can rest on our laurels and just hope that because we employ people that we call ‘creatives’, creativity will just happen naturally.
The most creative agencies don’t rest of their laurels. At Wieden + Kennedy’s London office, one of the first things visitors see is a shop-window mannequin that has a blender for a head. The mannequin is carrying a briefcase that has the words ‘Walk in stupid every morning’ written on it.
The message represents something that cofounder Dan Wieden believes in strongly: that is, that to find innovative ideas, people need to throw away all their assumptions and preconceived ideas.
One of the ways the tenet ‘walk in stupid every morning’ is applied is in the way staff are allocated to clients.
At most advertising agencies people are allocated to clients where they have significant industry experience. For example, if an agency is pitching for a cosmetics account, they typically identify everyone who has worked on beauty brands before and put them on the team.
Naturally clients love this because it makes them feel as if they have ‘industry experts’ working on their account, but at Wieden + Kennedy this idea gets flipped on its head; people are deliberately assigned to accounts where they don’t have oodles of experience in the category.
The Honda account is one example of this strategy in practice. Wieden + Kennedy instead put together a team of people who were not automotive veterans. Indeed, some of the people on the team didn’t even particularly like cars. But the work the agency produced for Honda was unlike anything else the industry had ever seen.
Google apply a similar principle to its recruiting. Laszlo Bock, Google’s VP of People Operations (right), describes in Work Rules! how at Google, the least important attribute the company looks for when recruiting is whether the applicant has had a large amount of experience in the type of role they are applying for.
Google believes that if they simply hire people who have done the same kinds of tasks before (and executed them really well), they will just want to replicate the same solutions at Google.
If you want to create something new, it’s hard to do so by continuing to execute the same solutions.
Take the time to reflect on how your agency internalises innovation and turns its creative talents back on itself. If you fail to do so, it’s only a matter of time before you will be disrupted by someone who is challenging the traditional agency model.
Dr Amantha Imber is the founder of innovation consultancy Inventium
