Yesterday, I came across this snippet of a Most Effective Agency acceptance speech from David Thomason (a fellow Kiwi and fellow planner):

“For some reason it’s traditional that the planning director is the one that gets to talk at the EFFIEs. But so many people had their way with these campaigns. In fact I’ve been thinking about what we’ve learned and if there’s one common theme across our most effective campaigns it’s that they’re the ones we had the biggest arguments about. Planning arguing with creative. Arguments with media. And perhaps slightly more diplomatic debates with our clients. So here’s to really healthy arguing!”

He makes a great point –that the effectiveness of a campaign (or, indeed, an agency) is the responsibility of everyone, not just the planners.

I like this. A lot.

The days of a planner spending weeks ensconced in an ivory tower before deigning to descend with stone tablets graven with a single beautifully crafted, internally cohesive strategy are over.

I’m firmly of the belief that an agency needs to work more like a rugby team and less like a relay race. Each player has a clearly defined role but the team can only succeed if everyone is working together, passing the ball when required and being prepared to step outside one’s position if the situation dictates it. Fluidity and collaboration are as important as the set plays.

A great brief (and, more importantly, a great briefing) is but the starting point of a great campaign. It is the game plan which should absolutely guide the work, but it must also stimulate and provoke the teams, opening doors to new places, new patterns of thought. It should be a document that creatives can write from, rather than write to. And it can’t ever be set in stone.

My good friend Richard Huntington (CSO, Saatchi & Saatchi London) is fond of the axiom that it is better to be interesting than right –after all, one can always check the veracity or appropriateness of something interesting, whereas it is much harder to add interestingness once you’ve convinced yourself that you have already landed on the “right” answer.

Once you move away from a didactic view of what is right, there is more room for collaboration across disciplines. Now, real collaboration is rarely frictionless, especially in an industry such as ours, filled with opinionated Type-A personalities. And friction creates heat –a culture where everything gets challenged and tempered will get us to better work than one in which a creative brief is simply passed like a baton from suit to planner to creative to production. I once worked at an agency where the work was consistently good, but was rarely great. The agency was full of terribly nice, polite English people who were always terribly nice and polite to each other while servicing terribly nice, polite English clients. It was all very “Keep Calm & Carry On” – there was no culture of challenging and pushing and shouting and fighting for better, and it showed in the work (which was invariably nice and polite).

Here at TAXI, we strive to create a culture where our work is open and up for debate. So we are in the process of putting all of our planners into one big office, working around one big desk, so that strategies and briefs can be thrashed around within the department. And we are creating a large comfortable lounge where briefings can take place and strategies can be collectively debated and refined, away from everyone’s individual distractions.

Yesterday, IT asked me what we were going to call that lounge. I’m thinking of dubbing it “The Argument Room”.