Creativity isn't everywhere; but it's definitely not in just one place
When we started The Park, we were very conscious that our first hire was not a creative director. We talked long and hard about the pros and cons of hiring one person to be responsible for our creative output, and eventually decided that we wanted to explore a different model, one that worked for both ourselves and our clients.
Instead of looking for one person - or even a team - we started to build a network made up of a variety of brilliant creative people. Our creative network now includes almost fifty people from traditional art directors and copywriters to actors, food stylists, sculptors, and street artists.
So far it’s been working brilliantly for us and our clients. We've found that the clear benefits are:
Personalisation
We build the creative resource based on the challenge our clients set us, we’re not sitting here with a team who we need to keep busy working on briefs that might not be right for them.
Specialists
We work with true specialists, people that are amazing at one thing and focus on that. There are too many generalists in our industry at the moment, people and agencies are claiming they can do everything which is a real problem. If we have an event brief we need to work with creative partners that have the relevant experience and a good understanding of what is logistically feasible.
Freshness
We are not tied to one person or team so can always look to bring new people into our network.
Creative culture and an empowered team
Our team don’t just default to the person with the word creative in their job title to get a creative solution; they are empowered to think about the best route themselves and work out who is best placed to deliver brilliance. We’re building a culture where everyone takes responsibility for delivering the best possible solution.
Cost savings
We’re not covering the salaries of creative teams; we only pay for what we use and these savings can be passed onto our clients.
The one thing we need to be continually conscious of is making sure that we’re not sharing the responsibility so broadly that no one is accountable, to negate this we’ve put a really simple and clear process in place too. We have clear guardrails but also a massive amount of creativity flexibility which is working for both our clients and our team.
Jack Lamacraft, founder and managing director, The Park
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