Attempt To Explain: Creative Agency
This week we ask ourselves, who even are we?
For an industry that literally trades on creativity (especially in this day and age), we’re really awful at explaining it. By design or disaster creativity is mystified, and so long as it is how can it be seriously valued?
We make ‘creative’ work, solve problems with ‘creativity’, some days the ‘creative’ juices don’t flow, other days it can’t stop won’t stop. It’s something ‘creative’ types always understate and the only thing ‘non-creative’ types will talk about. So what is it? Can anyone have it? Can you? Yes.
Let us Attempt to Explain: Creative Agency.
Strategy
We’ve worked on hundreds of clients, in hundreds of markets, making hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. Impressive, we know...
What’s always been true and is now kinda of undeniable is that the brands that thrive in their environments don’t need a “creative” agency to solve their problems. Rather they need “creative agency”.
Creative agency is when an individual has the confidence and clarity to express their ideas all on their own. They are empowered to hold strong opinions loosely and be decisive. It can be hard to do that especially if you’re starting from scratch– there’s nothing scarier than a blank page, especially when you don’t have a pencil.
Every idea is an original one, and without the right tools very few of them see the light of day. That’s why we’re invested in creating tools that allow our ideas to be chosen, interpreted and shared such that they multiply in as many meaningful ways as possible, that’s memes for you! Does that mean they sometimes run out of our control? Does it mean that sometimes people do things with them that we wouldn’t? Yes, and that’s the point– so long as we have the materials that give our collaborators the clarity and confidence in what they’re doing, we’re good.
When clients come to us they might think that a ‘creative’ object is graphic design or Thespian shaped. While these are the things most commonly identified, they actually only represent a sliver of creative potential executed. Most often the most insightful, original and resonant ideas come from deep immersion and whose business is it to be more immersed in our clients business than our clients themselves? The challenge for us isn’t in jazzing up whatever they have to say for themselves, that’s easy. Instead we invest in building the instructive materials (tools) to operate brands, regardless of how good you are at using the magic-wand tool– ToolKits™ for creative agency.
Delivery
While #delivery-team may not be directly responsible for creating the assets in the memes we make, the role we play is that of facilitating and guiding the creative decision-making process.
In the context of LAM, we need to be precise in our project planning up-front, before we kickoff internally, giving us the structure to start with our best foot forward.
But sometimes, things don’t go to plan.
There’s one glaring example I can share of how our team uses creative agency, the ability to be comfortable in the reactionary environment of a project. Furthering that, being able to filter a new set of objectives or information, into an altered actionable outcome is crucial.
We use our gut feelings, bad-mojo detectors & That So Raven-esque visions to determine how we will continue to move forward in a project that’s been shaken up a little.
In essence, our decisions determine the flow of work that the team executes on, determining the best case scenario. We then work to action how we want to get there, efficiently, effectively, entertainingly, how fun. The above is usually determined by a mixing pot of the following:
Client Expectations & Deadlines
Available Resource (Can we have 1 designer on this? or 5?)
Can we actually do that? Or are we insane?
Is this within our usual process? Yes? great.
Development Team
As a developer, one type of "Creative Agency" that I do is all about anticipating what users expect when they interact with the things that I build. Sure, some things are obvious, like closing a window when you click the "X" button.
But I'm talking about the more subtle actions that users still expect, even if they aren't spelled out in a design.
For example, when a modal opens, we consider things like whether clicking on the darkened background behind it should close the modal, or whether we should lock the page to prevent accidental scrolling. We could also think about how we can add subtle animations or transitions to make the modal more engaging.
Another type of Creative Agency involves solving problems in the code itself. We constantly make decisions about how to structure and componentize code to strike the right balance between readability, maintainability, and scalability.
As design iteration happens and components evolve - the code also needs to evolve with it. But, making changes to an existing design in Figma is usually a little bit easier than refactoring code.
A few tweaks here and there to an existing design can take a few minutes in Figma, but a few hours to do in development. As a developer this is when we need to decide on the best implementation based on the time required verses the quality of the implementation, and is probably one of the tougher examples of Creative Agency.
Design Team
I don’t intend to sound self aggrandising, but something like our Toolkit is a great example of what a ‘Creative Agency’ is. It’s packed with things that help guide creativity and creative decision making.
We have the Typestyle guide so that you not only know what fonts to use, but how to use them too. The colour palette can be an inspiring resource when creating some branded assets. The user can reference the Art Direction and Design Examples page a lot to get the vibe of the brand. On top of that, one of the most exciting things about a ‘Creative Agency’ like the Toolkit, is that it has room for interpretation. We’ll do our best to communicate our thinking and research behind the brand, but we don’t usually have strict guidelines on how things should be set up.
That’s because we know that brands can, and should, keep changing. This means the user can take the information, interpret it in the way they understand the brand, and create something unique themselves. Doesn’t this resemble something? It ties straight back to our concept of ‘Brand is a Meme’ – remember, memes are about the distribution of your own interpretation of something. Brand is the same, and we can make it happen with Toolkit.
The idea of the Toolkit being is own small ‘Agency’ is quite charming. It’s like having all of our hard work and love in a package, but we can keep updating it with our latest best practise and thoughts.
Elizaveta recently did an amazing workshop on Crazy 8’s (you should try it if you haven’t already) and we had some really fun ideas come through for the Toolkit. One thing we came up with was an AI integrated plugin.
We could teach an AI to learn all of the brand’s essence, explanations and expressions on the Toolkit, and then train it to create social posts. That would feel like literally having a ‘Creative Agency’ for yourself.
Attempt To Explain
A weekly(ish) newsletter by Love + Money.
Copyright © 2023
All Rights Reserved
Love + Money Agency
”Melbourne, VIC”
-
Love + Money acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land in which we work and pay our respects to Elders past, present, and emerging.
Ben—-You go barefoot and/or sockless? That’s the only way I go. And I beat my meat oh so often!!