Some issues by no means change: clients
A good relationship between the customer and the creative is often advertised as the key to great work. So it's surprising to hear it from Vicki Maguire, now CCO at Havas London, entered the advertising world in the late 1990s after working in fashion. She was shocked by the lack of direct communication between creative directors and the CMOS, MDs, or brand managers who hired them.
"When I look back, I can't remember even at creative director level that many creative people actually went to customers and have customer relationships," she told CR. “(Creative) were very often locked up in our ivory towers and very often worked on our own creative floor, where we could think in this kind of diluted atmosphere and didn't get stained when we had to go to a customer. Fortunately, the industry has changed, ”she says.
"When it comes to customer relationships, we're a lot more open, a lot more collaborative, and I think the creatives who still cut it are interested in solving business problems rather than snooping around." We go, we talk, we work on what the problem is and what keeps our customers awake at night – and if these relationships work well, we work together (to solve these problems). "
David Abbott wrote a piece about customers for the July 1982 issue of CR
This collaborative approach has long been central to many creative agencies. In an interview with CR in 1998, the mother's co-founders, Mark Waites and Robert Saville, spoke positively about working directly with brands. Saville told CR: "We really get our customers to work and contribute, not just as judges and juries, but also as process developers." However, this was not always the norm, and the idea that creatives The agency's core discussions of business discussions were met with opposition, and a CR article in the same year noted concerns about the changing role of creative director roles: “The job is now two or three times as difficult as before, "said Tim Mellors, creative director of Mellors Reay." It's not just about finding good creative work, but dealing with customers' problems and considering how the work fits into the general market spend most of their time in meetings to meet creative needs with mismatched research and budgets. ”