Re-Imagining Team One: Offsite Summary Notes

July 17, 2006

Recap of Meeting Objectives

• On Thursday, July 13/06, a group of cross disciplinary senior-level agency staffers met offsite to discuss three primary opportunity areas:

1. Setting a vision for the agency 2. Identifying key action steps to help make the

vision possible3. Recommending specific tactics to make change

happen now• What follows are the key agreements made during that

meeting.

Setting a Vision for the Agency: Achieving Relevance

•To help signal change both to our internal audience, Team One staffers at all levels across the organization, as well as to our key clients, we agreed on the sentiment behind this vision statement:

•The perceptual shift is twofold. First, the emphasis on innovative ideas - more than simply the

creation of traditional ads – appropriately positions the agency as being in the consideration set when it comes to creating long form pieces of communication, content channels and experience-first solutions.

Second, the emphasis on achieving contextual – as well as cultural – relevance, requires the agency to have increased knowledge about/a clear point-of-view on the consumer: how they live their lives, how they interact with products/brands/categories and how they consume media.

To consistently deliver innovative ideas that are culturally and contextually relevant.

Setting Priorities: Helping to Make the Vision Possible

1. Inspiring Bigger Ideas

•Problem Identification•Insight Discovery•Creative brief roundtable discussion•Multi-discipline creative briefing

While gathering insights was universally believed to be a high priority, improving the briefing process was seen as the biggest opportunity area.

2. Generating Bigger Ideas

•Multi-discipline creative development•All ideas flow through single creative source•Streamline internal evaluation process

The idea of perpetuating a culture where “a good idea can come from anywhere” was seen as a second high priority.

3. Selling Bigger Ideas

•Involve key clients in the process•Fully integrated creative presentations•Add theater/passion into presentation

The notion of getting our clients more actively involved with and committed to the work through out the process was seen as the third highest priority.

Opportunity

Action Top Priorities

•10 action items were identified to help make the vision possible.

•As a large group, we agreed that these 3 represented the critical action items: 1. Improving the creative brief process, 2. Activating the process of multi-discipline creative development, 3. Getting clients more involved throughout the process.

•As a next step, we then divided into 3 mini groups to make tactical suggestions on how we could bring these action areas to life within the agency.

Recommending Tactical Changes: Creative Briefing

• The workshop team developing tactical suggestions for improving the creative briefing process came up with these 3 suggestions for getting to more consistently inspired briefs: 1. Change the way we develop briefs, 2. Change the way we present the brief and 3. Change the way we generate ideas against the brief.

Developing the Brief

•Star Teams: Re-named/re-trained to focus on writing brief with contextual insights.

•Consider adding a client member to the star; the invite is as important as whether or not they join on a regular basis.

Presenting the Brief

•Internally, briefs should be presented in such a way that they bring the insights to life.

•Example: To bring the “curious mind” to life for Millstone, an offsite cooking demonstration was set-up with coffee as the main ingredient. Also, a consumer personification room was built at the agency.

Ideating Against the Brief

•Creative teams of 3 (or more) would be charged with executing against the brief.

•Example: 2 traditional creatives and a non-traditional creative (could be a senior level media person).

•Brainstorm ideas together at the point of briefing; show that the brief has legs.

Recommending Tactical Changes: Idea Generation

• The workshop team developing tactical suggestions for improving the process of integrated idea generation identified a number of key barriers and proposed an “all star team” solution to help make change happen.

Barriers to Change

•Lack of respect for individual department expertise (driven by a lack of understanding).

•Stuck in hold habits.

•Fear of taking risks.

•Chemistry/relationship issues.

•We’re too polite with one another; fear doing what’s right because we don’t want to offend.

•No enforcement; there are no current penalties for avoiding collaborative idea generation.

“Creative All-Star” Approach

•Create “All-Star” teams to help lead by example; not just cross-representational teams, but teams filled with the top talent.

•Teams would be: hand selected, small and work like the creative brief “star” team, but their work would be focused entirely around idea generation.

•Immediately, LSh and Brand would be top two Lexus projects to try out the All-Star team approach.

Recommending Tactical Changes: Client Involvement

• The workshop team developing tactical suggestions for improving the process of seeking client involvement/gaining client commitment to work identified a number of barriers and proposed solutions including generating a client generated assignment brief to kick-off all major projects.

Barriers Cause Solution

Clients provide poor initial input on the problems they want the agency to solve.

Clients sometimes don’t understand their business problems. And they don’t know what kind of input the agency requires.

•Create an assignment brief for the client to give to the agency: business issue, dashboard metrics, budget, timing and mandatories.

Clients have many opinions on the creative and can’t agree on how to evaluate the work.

Lack of early commitment to a brief means clients try to get through solutions only through the creative work.

•Use client initiated assignment brief as the kick-off to the creative brief.

Clients often change their opinions/feedback throughout the process.

Jr. clients guessing what management will buy. And they have nothing more than subjective opinions to fall back on.

•Put the option of “territory evaluation” research back onto the table to help get past client’s subjective opinions.

Many clients don’t know what great creative work looks like until it is done.

Clients have no framework, no background, in understanding what separates good from bad.

•Develop a series of programs to watch and evaluate “best of advertising” – such as a Cannes review.

Next Steps

• All team participants should review the above notes and add/change/delete to make certain the content adequately reflects the discussion that was originally had at the offsite meeting. Please send all follow-up comments to the attention of Paul

Silverman and Mark Miller.

• During the week of July 24, the senior leadership team (same as the group who met the first time) will reconvene to both agree on critical actions/tactics as well as to assign a series of RASCI responsibilities.