Creative Is Not Hard, Finding Talent Is

I was a bit apprehensive as the Exchange Series I: New Creative, New Tools session began. Billed as an interactive workshop, it began with a presentation on the big screen telling us about the creative process.  Describing the process from the perspective of the large agency with large clients, Tim Smith from Applied Design Group talked about how creative is often an afterthought, “putting lipstick on the pig” or “decorating the spec.”  Instead, shops need to use small groups empowered to make decisions and “steer the creative ideation” using agile development. 

I don’t know if eyes glazed over in the audience or not, but this was not the workshop I expected.  Luckily, this was the end of the presentation, and the beginning of a great interactive session.  The crowd of close to 200 broke up into four groups moderated by Tim and his crew of leaders Andrew Peters (UE Architect, Inc.),  Jason Wilson (Applied Design Group), and Joel Hladecek (Innovation, PHD).  I sat in on Tim’s group.

They had a plan to fill out a detailed scorecard of problems and implementations for the attendees that will be summarized later, but I think there was a bit too much detail for the hour session planned.  We made it through half the planned card, but I still think that was perfect.  If they need to talk about the remainder, they have an idea for a second session for the next ad:tech.

Because this was interactive, with the groups all adding to the discussion there were thing brought out that would not have come up if the session was led by one person with one perspective.  For example, Tim sees a dearth of talent of creative types.  He says that they are all heading off the Silicon Valley to work startups and they need to figure out how to retain the talented creative types.  But the attendees from LA and Denver had the opposite problem. They could not find enough talented technical staff and were struggling to get programmers who could deal with CSS, AJAX, Open Source code, and even Flash.  As one person put it, “just getting someone to put a click tag into flash is hard.”  Maybe there needs to be an exchange program between the Bay area and the rest of the country to distribute the talent pool.

Corporate structure was seen as a barrier to implementing many of the best practices.  Too many from large corporations complained that they wanted to try small teams and use new ideas, but the corporate ladder was resistant to change.  There were requirements for people from other areas of the company to be involved in every step and general structure impeding change.  If this sounds like you, change or get ready to watch your smaller competition blow you away.

CSS was a big issue of discussion as well.  Everyone says they use CSS, but there is a difference between using a few styles and having a detailed external stylesheet (or multiple sheets) to control the look and layout of the page.  Dynamic sites with multiple possible styles are possible and not difficult, but it seems that a number of companies out there have not embraced this fully.

Open source was another area where Tim felt that people needed to pay attention and use what is out there,  Yahoo was specifically mentioned as a great source of open source resources for their user interface library.

The session wrapped up with a summation from each of the four groups.  Our group agreed that the number one issue facing them was talent.  Technology is outstripping our ability to implement new things, but agencies are finding it hard to get the talented people to to get it done.  Jason’s group found that they were still struggling with technology and figuring out what yo use and how to measure it. Joel said that his group agreed that a technology plan was important, but nobody has implemented one.  They also had the same issues of structure interfering with the ability to create small teams.  Andrew’s group came to the conclusion that they need to make sure they do what works, and not implement the latest technology that the customer happens to read about in the WSJ.

The board of ad:tech made a great decision by adding these Exchange style sessions to the show.  Attendees seemed to agree that this was a terrific way to get ideas across and learn. I know that this session was one of the best I’ve been to in the last few years.