Advertising agency standards improving

How can the creative quality of advertising in the Middle East be raised? Its an enduring gripe among progressive advertising agencies that standards in the region are low, not just compared with advanced markets such as the US and Western Europe but also with much of Asia.

But things are improving, as agencies from the region start to nibble with increasing frequency at the score-sheets of international advertising awards shows. However, while we are improving, the rest of the world's agencies are not standing still either.

So agency managements must continue to find ways to get their creative departments working more effectively, and more adventurously. (I am sure Gulf News readers don't need me to spell out why more creative more effective or perhaps another time?).

Traditionally, agency creatives work in two-strong teams of copywriter and art director a words person and a picture person, though roles overlap who are given days or, if they are lucky, weeks to come up with ideas whose authorship they jealously defend against pusillanimous agency colleagues and uncomprehending clients alike.

The danger is, of course, that a certain tunnel vision can develop and, if a client doesn't respond to the resulting idea, much time has passed and panic mode ensues with a dire impact on the final work.

'The Tribe'

This has been the model for 40 years or more, with little fundamental change in working practices.

However, there is a fast-growing trend, in our agency at least, to apply a radically different approach, one we call 'The Tribe'.

This is a process in which we take our creative teams out of their comfort zones, and confront them with the most sure-fire factors to enhance creativity: (1) a guest creative director that they want to impress; (2) different creative partners to work with; (3) a stimulatingly different working environment from the comfortable, familiar office; (4) a desperately short time in which to deliver.

This is far from the traditional Dilbert-style brainstorm. By trial and error and with input from behavioural psychologists, strategic planners and, perhaps surprisingly, improvisational stand-up comedians we have developed an unusual, highly-structured, disciplined and pressurised way of working for two or three days in so that more ideas are generated than used to be over two or three weeks.

This is partly because the numbers of people we call upon. We bring together our best teams, from different offices and different disciplines, mix up their usual working partnerships, and set them the task.

Intellectual leaps

We work for very short periods of time anything from 20 minutes to an hour before getting back together to review the results. At this point we encourage complete positivity, generosity, lack of ego and, most importantly, cross-fertilisation of ideas. So any team is free to take any other team's ideas and build on them. Thus you get the collective power of all these minds making intellectual leaps and associations around the same group of relevant ideas.

Ideally, we like to have the client there at the outset, to brief the teams personally and see the wealth of talent we have assembled on their behalf. At the end of 'The Tribe', the client returns to see the results. Invariably, the result is a phenomenally impressive raft of ideas. But this isn't just a creative exercise: it s a business model that is being applied ever more widely across the network.

In this region, we think it may well be a way to bring our multi-award-winning expatriates together with locally-grown talent to achieve a synthesis that is both true to its own culture and resonant with local consumers while being intelligible to awards juries worldwide.

In short, like all the best work from the West and Asia, tremendously effective commercially, and hugely enchanting creatively.

And if Middle Eastern advertisers and their agencies don't aim to be both of those, they might as well jack it in today.

- The writer is the regional creative director of Saatchi & Saatchi.