A WELL ARTICULATED VISION

How have you evolved your approach for identifying new solutions and insights?

The majority of the most interesting client challenges we’re seeing right now benefit from complex responses covering strategy, data, tech, media, creative, analytics and beyond – and not necessarily in that order.

A traditional agency might approach this by running through the list of functions as if they’re linear, flowing one-way like water over a cliff. But, of course, good problem solving isn’t linear. Sometimes it’s the creative department that cracks the strategy, and the strategy department that has the best media ideas, and so on.

We look to create upside by systematically passing the problem and solution back and forth across disciplines as we go, and investing in talent that has a special interest or training in cross-functionality.

An experience delivery lead is a good example of this, as they have accountabilities across strategy, creative and production. This approach is also more likely to unlock lesser-heard perspectives throughout the process and often delivers unexpected and innovative solutions that meet complexity with creativity. In other words, it’s a focus on cross-functionality.

What was one of the thorniest challenges you faced in the last year?

So many thorny challenges. But one I’m fond of involves using a convolutional neural network to analyze more than 10 million miles of the U.S. road network. We were looking for roads that matched the iconic shape of BMW’s rear window, the Hofmeister Kink. Our Group Director, Product Developer Arnaud Icard built the model from scratch, including developing synthetic training sets and running inference on them over multiple days of processing time on a Tesla V100 GPU –basically high-performance computing. We learned so much. And were surprised at the difference between what a human thinks of as a good match and what a machine thinks is a good match.

Have you changed the way you hire, mentor and recruit new staff?

I’m always excited about people with strong core specializations. That could be a person who is good at generating and structuring ideas in an easily transmissible format, or someone who knows how to use After Effects to put design into motion, or someone who knows how to run a successful technical build. Then our job as an agency is to focus and surround that skill with the rest of the agency’s collective genius and capabilities. When that happens, there’s good growth for everyone, plus our clients get the value of true specialist talent on their brief. If you’re really good at something specific, and that thing is useful to what we’re making with our clients, chances are we’ll all prosper.

In addition to our organizational training and mentorship programs, we’re looking to support employees on their journeys to get sharper on specializations that are interesting and motivating to them. As a bonus, deep specialization seems to enable more powerful cross-functionality.

What makes an agency great?

Vision. A powerful, well-articulated vision helps everyone know what mountain we’re trying to climb and why. It helps clients know what to expect from us. An agency is going to make millions of decisions in a year. A clear vision provides direction at all zoom levels, helping all those decisions add up to more than their parts.

What work did you admire most from the previous year that neither you nor anyone else at your agency worked on?

Jesse Wente’s memoir, Unreconciled – go check it out. In our world, I admire the idea and UX at the heart of Zulu’s “Micropedia of Microaggressions” and also how FCB NY put together the tech behind its “McEnroe vs McEnroe” activation for AB InBev. I also liked NFA’s Little Caesar’s “Naming Rights” project a lot. It just wins at doing what it set out to do.