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Advertising

Searching for discomfort: why we chose to leave a brand and go back to an agency

By Sara Uhelski & Leila Moussaoui, Copywriter, art director

April 11, 2018 | 5 min read

In the fast-moving world of advertising, creatives are always seeking growth. We want to get better as professionals and individuals, and we want to keep doing better work: work that challenges, inspires and pushes boundaries. This may be why we see a lot of movement in our industry and, more recently, an increasing trend of professionals leaving agencies and deciding to work for brands in-house.

Searching for discomfort

As a creative team that worked at both an agency and in-house for the last five years, we believe that brands need an outside perspective - whether in the form of an ad agency, PR or consultancy firm. Brands need that sweet discomfort that makes them question who they are and what they do to present themselves to the world in fresh and provocative ways. It’s the discomfort that leads to greatness. That's why we decided to buck the trend and go back to an agency: to keep searching for that sweet discomfort.

When we first started our career at an agency, we loved the energy, the people around us and all the possibilities ahead. Every brief was an opportunity to improve our craft, to solve problems in unexpected ways, to move people and to create noise in the industry. But we also faced a few challenges. We didn't always have access to the best briefs or the higher profile clients; we were improving our craft but not always owning the work. For instance, we didn’t have as much of a say on the briefs that we got to work on, and we didn’t get to present as much of our work to clients as we hoped for. For all those reasons, when we saw the opportunity to work closer to a client, we thought that it would be a great way to learn a different side of the business and to push our work.

Working for a major technology brand in-house, we entered a completely different world. We became brand experts, learning about new products and technologies before they were released. We also became experts at understanding the brand's personality - its mission, values, and process. Unlike our previous agency where everyone’s role was set, we had to expand our skills beyond the creative department; having to learn to react to business realities and to wear different hats, taking on project management, strategist, and producer tasks. We had to let go of previous misconceptions, adapt to a new reality and embrace the business side of advertising.

What we lacked and desired a few years back - working on more significant projects, being closer to the decision makers and being able to sell your work - was all finally happening. What we didn't expect was that all that proximity to the client would also work against us, and more importantly, against creativity.

The more you become an expert, the more you start to understand exactly what the client wants and doesn’t want. You start predicting what kind of creative gets approved; and, whether you do it consciously or not, you start tailoring your thinking towards that. Some may even slip into the territory of looking for easy wins and playing it safe, unable to see or admit to a problem that needs solving. We saw ourselves getting creatively comfortable. And comfort is the biggest hindrance to creativity.

Our duty as creatives is to innovate: to keep on bringing something new to the world, to keep on pushing our thinking, to help brands find new perspectives and consumers feel things they never felt before. And the only way we can get there is by continually searching for that discomfort.

Now, as we transition back into an advertising agency, we understand better than ever the need to bring disruptive work to brands. It's easy to create work that answers a brief and satisfies the client. But the only way to keep learning and growing, the only way to truly innovate, is to search for the discomfort that will open up people’s minds. While we value the set of skills we acquired working in-house, we genuinely believe that the best work comes when you look at creative challenges from all perspectives, from inside and out.

Sara Uhelski is copywriter and Leila Moussaoui is art director at TBD in San Francisco.

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