IX Use Case: : ‘Think Different’ Within An Advertising Agency

The third in a series of use-cases for Ideasicle X in the advertising world, this one focusing on agencies recruiting their own employees as Ideasicle X teams.

Internal silos block potential ideas

Many larger “full service” advertising agencies, through no fault of their own other than growing, can end up as a collection of siloed P&Ls. This wing is for the advertising team, that wing is for PR, and that wing over there is for digital. Oh, and media? You’re on a different floor completely. While this built-in insularity is good for the health of the respective disciplines, it’s not always good for coming up with the best ideas for an agency’s clients. And that’s because ideas are generated within those disciplines and not across them.

Worse, when cross-discipline brainstorms are put together there tends to be a natural cast system in place as it relates to ideas and respect. Meaning, the unspoken center of gravity in the brainstorms are those from the creative department. PR defers to them, Digital defers to them, Media defers to them, and potentially great ideas are dismissed or aren’t voiced at all out of fear of dismissal.

Throw remote working into all this and what’s an idea to do?

A new application of “Think Different”

With Ideasicle X, users don’t have to invite outside freelancers. They can, instead, invite only employees. Better yet, they can invite employees from the different disciplines to work together. Because on our platform each participant is reduced to a typeface, they are all on equal footing, allowing their very different perspectives to collide with each other in ways never seen before in the agency world.

Let’s say a large agency in San Francisco needs a new hook for an upcoming promotion on an automotive client. In the past, only those from the promotions discipline would develop the ideas. But due to the virtual nature of Ideasicle X, the possibilities for the agency are endless. They could invite two people from promotions - you do want that expertise on the team to “anchor” the rest of the team into the realities of the promotions space - and then maybe one creative director from the car account and a social media specialist. Or maybe it’s one promotions person, one creative director from the car account, one public relations specialist, and your resident cultural anthropologist or one of your more creative brand planners. Heck, you might even go crazy and invite one of your clients to participate.

But what you’ll be doing is harnessing the most powerful form of diversity: diversity of thought. Different perspectives, different disciplines, different world views, different everything, all from within your agency. Because these differences, when shared in the form of ideas on the Ideasicle X platform, will accelerate the idea generation because each participant thinks different.

They’ll sharpen as they cut

So in the short term Ideasicle X will help you get to better ideas faster on a project by project basis. But another benefit of integrating Ideasicle X into the way your agency works is that each participant learns from the others on their team and is better for it. Meaning, the PR people who rarely ever worked with the social media people, are now seeing all these ideas posted by the social media people and learning about that discipline along the way.

In short, the participants in Ideasicle X projects sharpen their integration skills as they cut, or as they do more and more projects with more and more different disciplines. You will see your agency become less siloed and more truly integrated at an individual level over time.

Oh, and you already pay them

What this use case illustrates is that Ideasicle X can bridge your internal silos in incredibly productive ways. You will get more out of your employees in ways they will enjoy (coming up with ideas in teams of four is just plain fun) and they will feel pride in even being invited. Good for your clients’ business, good for your people, good for morale as well.

And you don’t have to pay them because, well, you already do.