The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

Apparently a local Shanghai government council had reached out to him asking to help design a new area of their district. As part of their briefing, they’d said they wanted it to look and feel like parts of New York. This architect went on to explain that it wasn’t possible because what had really impacted how NYC was designed, was time.

I would link to the article because I wrote a post about it years ago, but can I find it? Can I hell.

Anyway, this got me thinking about creativity and how – with the pressure to PROVE our work is effective in the shortest amount of time possible or face the risk of the client firing us – we may be stopping our ideas from ever fulfilling their full potential.

Or the clients are.

Now I appreciate we live in competitive times.

I also appreciate there needs to see signs of positive impact and/or change along the way, rather than just have blind faith.

But we also need to acknowledge that some ideas take time to find their time. Or audience.

History is littered with examples of this but they didn’t happen because someone forced it, it’s because there needed to be the conditions for it.

The point being, that I am fed up of the narrative that ad agencies don’t care about effectiveness. Almost as fed up as I am that consultancies like McKinsey, Bain and Deloittes are the masters of it. Putting aside their whole business model is founded on telling companies what to do rather than take any responsibility for fixing any of it – we need the clients to be part of the solution. To commit in terms of attitude, conditions and time.

The quest for quick wins is increasingly resulting in us getting exactly that. A quick win … not a long, lasting and sustainable win.