Ross Giles and Seán Timbs, Creative Director and Senior Copywriter at Dynamo, reflect on the traditional division between brand, design and advertising agencies and why it shackles the true potential of brands.
On the 26th of this month, the Olympic torch will be in full flame in Paris as the games get underway. Don’t get excited, this piece will have nothing to do with that, but it does provide the opportunity to begin with a creative team’s favourite pastime – the slightly laboured metaphor.
If we were to compare the typical creative process to an Olympic event, the one that first springs to mind is the relay. One agency takes the brand and progresses it so far before suddenly their race is run, and they hand it off to somebody else. This continues until you have advertising booting it down the home stretch with their mind on gold (although the type you find in Cannes, not Paris).
But here, as warned/promised, is where the metaphor becomes laboured. In a relay, the winning team has a clear strategy, requiring the right talent at the right moment, each capitalising on what’s been achieved by the team member before. It’s already starting to sound less like what we’re used to in the industry, isn’t it? The truth is, a lot of us are running our own race, with our own strategy and our own glory in mind.
As an Art Director and Copywriter who first crossed paths in an ATL agency, we’re familiar with what that baton hand-off can look like to a creative team. A WeTransfer zip concealing a brand guidelines PDF with some detail on colour, logo placement and font. You accept you can’t change the colour, agree you will change the logo placement and fire off an email to see if they’re really all that married to the font.
Jokes aside, how often do the creatives responsible for advertising the brand get so much as a walk-through from the people who created it, let alone the chance to actually collaborate and strategise with them? No, they’re back at the starting line, and we’re already sprinting (and leaving ourselves ground to make up in the long term).
It’s by no means the fault or bad will of those who are executing it, we’ve been and still are those soldiers runners, but it can quickly feel like the brand doesn’t do what we want it to do. Why does that thing have to be there? That tagline is restricting. Can I just say ‘red’ instead of ‘Burnt Sienna’? It’s easy to believe, or hope, that a brand is a carte blanche (carte Burnt Sienna?) that we can get straight to putting our own stamp on, but instead fracturing it or ignoring the potential within.
What became clear in joining Dynamo is the full body of creativity that goes into a living, breathing brand. The inspiration, the rationale, the references, the concept, the execution. An entire personality and worldview that can exist in a logo refresh, let alone a name, tagline or tone of voice. All viable elements, with their DNA firmly within a brand, that are often left behind somewhere along the track.
But importantly, and in defence of the ad teams, their gripes aren’t always inaccurate. When the delivery of the new brand is the finish line for an agency, there isn’t always the right amount of space left to find its feet further along the way. The desire to nail the job on a creative level in the branding agency can result in a highly conceptual delivery that is difficult to flex to everything it needs to do later on.
This is why we think of the ideal creative process as less like relay and more like rowing, with everyone in the boat and all pulling in the same direction. At Dynamo, we pitch to clients the benefit of an end-to-end brand to advertising model under one roof, not in terms of cost or convenience, but in terms of the pure freedom for their brand to grow, move and evolve in unexpected ways. Sometimes that’s a step backwards to take two forwards. And it’s precisely this unexpectedness and non-linear development that makes the relay model less fit-for-purpose than ever.
It’s also an incredible environment to work in as a creative. As brands are at the earliest stages, advertising teams can provide guidance on how the smallest seeds might impact communications months or even years down the line. When that same advertising team pitches their ideas, there are the original brand designers, FMCG designers and motion directors are present. They can advise, and even adapt, to really allow a brand to utilise all its component parts together in the pursuit of great work. There is no legacy to lug around, only one holistic brand constantly in positive flux.
It’s been endlessly eye-opening to work in a way that breaks down the barriers not just within individual types of agencies but within the entire creative process by uniting brand, design, production and advertising. We hope the future of our industry holds a lot more of diverse talent rowing in together, whether under one roof or multiple. Let’s make ‘dropping the baton’, for ourselves at least, a positive phrase.
Ross Giles and Seán Timbs, Creative Director and Senior Copywriter at Dynamo
