My Days of .Com
Future of Interactive Advertising

What should an Interactive Agency offer?

Written by Mihai Dragan on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 ( One response )
Tags: clients, creativity, development, interactive, interactive agency, strategy

Strong Strategy Planning ? Maybe Outstanding Creativity? Who knows … maybe the Return on Investment is all it matters. How about implementation? But hey … do people actually know what an Interactive Agency is?

A few weeks ago I’ve started a little poll on LinkedIn asking people to tell me what do they think an Interactive Agency should offer. 55 people answered so far.

The options were:

1. Strong Strategy Planning
2. Outstanding Creativity
3. Development Skills
4. Return On Investment
5. What is An Interactive Agency?

Here are the conclusions:

1. Creativity is King

47 % of people that answered chose “Outstanding Creativity” as what they’re looking for in an Interactive Agency. Next is Return on Investment (20%) and Strong Strategy Planning (18%).

Only 3 percent chose Development Skills and about 10 percent were still to find out what an Interactive Agency is.

2. Decision makers focus on Return on Investment and Strategy

Most of the owners and managers selected Return On Investment and Strong Strategy Planning as their choice. In case you were pitching to the deal maker, try to focus on the strategy and return on investment rather than the creative campaigns you thought of.

This should not mean ideas and great execution are useless but rather that they have a greater chance of success with the big guys when backed by good strategy planning and an idea on return on investment.

3. Men love Creativity

An astonishing 63.6% of men would choose Creativity over other agency assets. The rest chose Strong Strategy Planning. With men is either black or white, right ?

It seems a lot of women are not familiar with the term “Interactive Agency” as 33 % chose “What is An Interactive Agency” as their answer.

Other interesting things I’ve noticed:

• The older you get the more you care about strategy (planning is not the most popular thing among the young and cool)
• Women care about development skills (at least in this poll)
• Marketing and Product Management care about ROI and IT cares about creativity
• Most small and medium companies chose creativity as the most important asset

Long story short – everybody’s looking for creativity but they’re willing to pay for Strategy Planning and ROI.

Brainrock

Written by Mihai Dragan on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 ( 3 responses )
Tags: brainfuck, brainrock, creativity, mb dragan, team

One of the interesting things we do at at agency is we all get together in the attic, every Tuesday at 12 PM and discuss ideas. We call it Brainrock.

How do we do it? There is one guy or gal presenting a given subject for about 15 minutes (it doesn’t matter if it has anything to do with the agency, internet, work or whatever). After those 15 minutes the hole team debates on the subject. It’s like a brainstorm with no purpose other than to trigger new concepts, encourage creative thinking and … well … have a good time.

We like to “baldly go where no one has gone before”. We start with usual things like “The future of computing”, “Human evolution from wildness to modern time”, “Social condition of prostitutes” and end up with interesting (well … sometimes weird) theories regarding the financial crisis, human collective thinking, a future with no privacy, mind control or psychokinesis. Yeah, we think too much .

I don’t know of other such activities in agencies (the closest you will get to this is the usual, boring, “do we have to do this … ?” brainstorm). It is however a very good way to a. exchange information between different types of creatives (programmers, designers, copywriters, account managers, strategy planners even sales managers and executives – we all consider ourselves creative people) and b. discover new ways to look at common subjects.

Did I mention we used to call it Brainfuck?