concepts while still pleasing the client. As we exchange insights and challenge each other’s creative responses to things, we connect through a shared love of design and an appetite to learn new skills that produce bigger and better work.

The broadening range of skills within the agency—from the brand-design and offline-marketing experience held by many digital immigrants to the cutting-edge digital skills of the natives—is vital in a business where, any given week, our clients might ask for deliverables ranging from A to Z. It goes without saying that digital natives, the Swiss Army Knife of creatives, are invaluable in this work. But equally important is the agility with which the agency management applies these resources to the work at hand.

At Organic we take a dynamic approach to staffing that reflects the constantly changing nature of our work. The creative group in our New York office consists of five defined teams, each led by a creative director and comprising a typical structure of assistant creative director, art director, senior designer, designer, copywriter, and motion designer. Rather than remaining fixed, though, these teams provide a fluid pool of talent that can be reassembled to meet a broad spectrum of requirements. Creative directors have visibility into each other’s work and swap resources laterally to build the ideal mini-team for each specific project—a copywriter from one group, an art director from another, a designer from a third. We think of it more as “casting” than resourcing: bringing together the ideal

mix not only of skills, but also of personalities, to deliver the best work. Is there a creative visionary on the team? Is there a driver who’ll make sure the deadlines are hit? What are all the different ways we can bring people together to create different responses?

Once a project team has been assembled—but long before we start thinking about tools and execution—we kick off the project with a workshop to foster collaboration and conceptual brainstorming. The first step is to sequester ourselves in a room with no digital access— whiteboard and pens only—and develop concepts to establish the creative and thematic direction of the brand experience. We use a team-based approach to challenge and refine each other’s ideas, and draw on methods developed with the help of an outside facilitator to keep these sessions consistent and fruitful, while encouraging speed and creative ideation. Once we’ve agreed on three concepts, we move into a story-board/sketch phase to see how they might start to be applied— still in written form only, and very loose. We also start to do background research: What is out there already? What platforms, software, and partners could we leverage to support our thinking? From these workshops we pull the strongest ideas and present them either to a larger internal team for validation, or, depending on the project, directly to the client. This typically produces a couple of frontrunners to start visualization and exploration with. Finally, one or two ideas move on to prototyping.

Ultimately, of course, such internal agency dynamics are less interesting to the client than the results we deliver. As executives call on digital marketing agencies to play a more strategic role, our ability to sell bigger ideas makes it possible for us to offer contributions that move beyond the pixel and into other environments. When I look at some of the solutions that we’ve done in the past year, I see mobile applications, social networks, video concepts that connect 30-second clips to short films, and digital signage in Time Square that flows in the retail environment. Digital natives, rapid prototypes, and a broadening sense of the potential of digital marketing have helped us come this far. Where the industry goes next remains to be seen—but I look forward to finding out.

 

ABOU T ThE AU ThOr Conor Brady is the executive creative director at Organic. His client work at Organic includes Bank of America, iVillage, Sony Ericsson, and NBC. Brady joined Organic from Razorfish, where he was a creative director since 2001 working with brands including Conde Nast, Taj Hotels, Ford Motor Company, NBC, Nielsen Media, and the redesign of the New York Times website.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without the fee, provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on services or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. © ACM 1072-5220/08/0700 $5.00

July + August 2008