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The Advertising Week Disruptive Debate: Key takeaways

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By Jennifer Faull, Deputy Editor

October 7, 2014 | 4 min read

Education, the agency model and creativity are all parts of the industry being disrupted by technology and were three key areas of discussion at The Drum’s Disruptive Debate at Advertising Week New York.

Led by The Drum’s editor at large, Dave Birss, the panel included AOL digital prophet David Shing, director of digital at Anomaly, Fredrik Haghammar, CEO at Standard Media Index, Sue Fernessey, founder and CEO of Evrythng, Niall Murphy and Curious NYC founder, Mark Fallows.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

Don’t start with the technology

Asked if technology was hampering creativity, Fallows urged people to switch off if they want to tap into creative ideas.

“When we are connected, particularly to personal devices, we are not switching off,” he said, referring to the likes of Thomas Edison who would stare into a fire and wait for an idea to come to him.

Murphy agreed, adding that conventionally the way to approach design and the creative process was to look the constraints of technology and build within them.

“But now we’re in an environment where you can think beyond them, and invent on demand. It’s more important to remove the constraints of understanding how things are going to get done and just look at could be done. The technology will then get behind it,” he said.

Haghammar added that if you start with technology the you’re wasting your time

Educate

The panellists all agreed that education in traditional advertising industries was lacking, and as technology continued to evolve at break neck speed, programmes needed investment to help people who did not possess the technical skills.

Shing suggested that the problem lay in that agency leaders were simply not investing.

Fallows agreed: “Looking at the big ad agencies, we haven’t got an education programme to inspire or train or direct people that don’t have the technical skills to deliver the kind of ideas that clients or society actually needs. The business model we currently sit on doesn’t support the kind of hiring or the types of people needed to deliver that process of change.”

Haghammar pointed to production companies, which he believes are out-succeeding the industry at large as there is a craft behind it which must be continuously learned and evolved.

“In the industry, there are too many copywriters that can’t write, too many art directors that can’t design,” he said.

Rid the agency of departments

The topic of education in agencies led the panel to suggest that the traditional model of departments and ‘heads-of’ within each sector was restricting the integration of technology and creativity.

“The idea of having the knowledge contained in one person or department means that everyone else can’t see the opportunities or sell the ideas,” suggested Birss.

Agreeing, Shing said that the agency organisation needed to be turned upside down, “but you still need a leader, someone to inspire people to do better than they could do.”

Meanwhile, Fallows said that agency heads need to “get over the notion that creativity is a department”.

“It’s not, it’s a culture. Loads of agencies talk about it but they don’t, they don’t put the hiring processes in place and there are too many egos within the industry that prevent it from happening.”

Haghammer believes that there is a wider culture problem.

“We don’t have the same problem in Sweden as we do here in America with advertising. We collaborate more in between the layers. We don’t have the guys who make it in the basement and the strategy on top,” he said, and explained that agencies must organise themselves in a much more dynamic way – with ad hoc creation client."

Creatives take the lead

Finally, Fernessey imagined a time when tech companies were no longer leading the change in advertising with the creation of new platfroms and products, but rather the people currently creating for these platfroms are.

“Today the tech is the lead. But flip that where the creatives are the lead and the tech platforms follow. Tech companies should be enabling and inspiring – they shouldn’t be the hero,” she said.

Shing added that “creative is back with a capital C” there is more demand for the creative industries – especially those who want to be different - than ever before.

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