Creative departments should do more than “creative”.
May 15, 2014
Todd Henderson

Creative departments should do more than “creative”.

What did you do today? Make an ad? Design a website? Craft a killer email? Congrats, you’ve done part of your job. Perhaps even very well. But if that’s all you’re doing, you aren’t doing it right.

Creative departments need to be pushing the entire agency to be more creative. We need to inspire, collaborate and unlock new thinking. Agencies that make a difference rarely do so without a strong creative culture. We can rave about things like process and fundamentals all we want; if we don’t bring great ideas to the table, we are irrelevant. In the INK creative department, we push each other (and the rest of the agency) to ask “what if” every day. What if we found a different way to solve our clients’ challenges? What if we swapped jobs with the account team for a day? What if we wrote an agency theme song? Honestly, the questions don’t really matter all that much. It’s the practice of opening your mind to new thoughts and challenging convention that makes the difference. If your brain’s always pointed in the same direction, it’s bound to miss a lot of great ideas as they pass by. And those ideas are what we get paid for. Sure, we may charge for a landing page, a TV spot or a social campaign. But without an idea behind them, how much do you think clients will pay? There’s always a guy with a MAC (or a camera, or a Facebook account) who’s willing to churn out work cheaper than you. We can’t win that battle. So, here’s an idea—what if we just don’t fight it?