Nic Owen Calls for Total Creative Collaboration

To be successful in this internet-driven century, companies need to move at the pace of digital culture and technology. There’s no time for a siloed process, baton passing between departments; mastering the art of true collaboration and iteration is vital. And in our business, for this to work this ethos needs to imbue every part of an agency’s machine. An ego-free creative environment, bolstered by a shared ambition to think expansively and responsibly, is the only way to attack today’s brand’s issues.

We have some principles that we hold dear; the most important is to create a culture that puts the group before the individual. This gets greater ideas in a swifter, more efficient manner, and fosters a more human and caring environment.

Collaboration has become a bit of a cliché in our industry. The bad news for people who throw it about to look relevant, is that it doesn’t work superficially. Collaboration usually only exists between the agency and client, so it’s only used in meetings or presentations. This limits its impact massively.

Creative work can be made more pointed, more expansive and more immersive through deep collaboration at every stage of the process. It also speed things up - a necessary evil when working at today’s pace.

For example, if a brief is initially worked on in isolation by a strategist, how is that a good use of time and team talent? By getting creatives thinking early, and by developing the brief together as a team, we ensure the strategy is actionable and that creative ideas get realised more quickly. The brief is only there in service of the work, don’t forget.

Overall the more upstream you can bring other disciplines, the more smartly ideas can develop. Bringing production and business affairs into first reviews helps for multiple reasons - production is at least 50% of the potential magic, so the more you can have craft and making embedded in early thinking, the more prepared you can be. In marketing, you should be ambitious thinkers but also realists - having production involved early and shutting down things due to legal or budgetary constraints is not about being limiting, it is simply good business sense.

We talk about disciplines versus departments at 72andSunny - this helps our people to think of themselves as playing a role in a team containing complementary skills versus identifying first and foremost with their colleagues in a specific department. This doesn’t mean there is not shared learning and best practices within disciplines, it means when you work on a project, you identify with the members of the team, regardless of discipline.  Within that group everyone brings expertise, which must be respected and utilized because everyone can take the idea to the next level.

To this end, for it to work, creative directors have to act more like chairmen - shifting the debate, making sure all sides have room to explore, before identifying the right way forward - versus being chief executives or dictators.

This can be hard for some creative people, who have to be brave enough to have their ideas laid bare to be made better, and generous enough to accept the consequences. But we passionately believe it garners better results. It’s vital to note we are not looking for consensus, we are looking for great. We just believe this can be achieved by putting value and ego in the final result, versus the original nugget of the idea.

This may be perceived as requiring a radical redux of power, but it’s actually about broadening the scope of the idea. Putting your personal feeling of accomplishment (and ego) on the overall collective result is a must. Embracing this attitude is emancipating, it enables you to listen, build and move on when things aren’t working. It supports a system of iteration that we have learnt from working with tech companies such as Google and Samsung.

Critics of this way of working would say it’s the enemy of singular vision, that great creativity is not borne of committee, but by forcing a way through the malaise to get to something brilliant.

This may be the case for some people, but we feel this view is a little dated. A game changing agency from the later 90s, London’s HHCL, had a mantra; ‘strong views, lightly held’. I like the sentiment of this - it’s not about not having beliefs, but it’s about being mature and insightful enough to know that sometimes these positions may change.

So, for collaboration to exist on a true meaningful level, it needs to be exploited at every opportunity in the creative process - not just in client meetings. You need to develop the muscle memory to work like this throughout your organisation at all stages, to get to better, deeper, broader, quicker.