Nine years and five agency jobs into the business, I found a different kind of creative process. Or really, it found me in a moment of desperation. The date: December 12, 1993. Our fledgling startup of an ad agency named WONGDOODY — founded by yours truly (the WONG) and Pat Doody (the DOODY) —was barely a month old. Our first office space: a 9’ by 12’ conference room that belonged to a commercial real estate agent in a windowless downtown Seattle high rise, filled with old 1980s office furniture and a small, unframed photo of the Emerald City’s skyline to remind us of what the outside world looked like.
Besides Pat and me, the entire staff comprised our first employee, account executive and strategist Rene Huey, along with graphic designer Gwenne Wilcox and a part-time freelance copywriter named Craig Hoit.
Ideas and layouts for the annual product advertising campaign for our first big client, K2 Skis, were due in just three days. Craig and I were the only two available to work on the advertising assignment. And everyone was already working on multiple projects for K2 and other clients.
Time was short and we desperately needed ideas.
I thought, “Pat is smart, understands the strategy behind the assignment and is a skier. Rene is smart, wrote the strategy and is also an avid skier.” As lifelong skiers, they both had insight into the target customer.
I needed their help to come up with ideas. And so, I asked them.
My old creative bosses would have considered this complete lunacy: “These people are not trained in the dark arts of creativity! They will only mimic what the clients wants. And that’s total crap!”
As the “creative director” in a typical ad agency environment, I would be the de facto “dictator.” I own the process. I own the decisions. So, why would I ever relinquish the power bestowed upon me by decades of ad-industry norms? My creative forebears would have commanded me to unleash my creative iron fist!
But desperate times call for desperate measures.
On that Monday, I made the request to Pat and Rene: we need ideas, ideas, ideas! 48 hours later, we gathered in our windowless hovel of an office, without enough space or chairs for all of us. Craig and I sat on the floor. Pat and Rene took the chairs.
Then we began to toss scraps of paper into the middle of the floor. On those scraps were scrawled headlines; garbled, unformed thoughts; haikus; chicken scratchings of layouts; ripped-out photos from ski and travel magazines. I asked everyone to comment on each and every scrap of an idea.
Was the messaging right? Was it on target? Was it unexpected? Was it on brand? Was it cool? Discuss. Rinse. Repeat. We formed three piles:
Pile 1: YES. “This has merit.”
Pile 2: NO. “This is not working.”
Pile 3: MAYBE. “There’s something here, but it needs work.”
It was my job as creative director to facilitate the discussion, keep us
focused on strategy and to push as many ideas as possible from the “maybe” pile into the “yes” pile. Everyone had a voice and a vote.
The piles were fairly even. The “yes” pile contained mostly good ideas, with some great ideas. All of them were strategically dead on. The “no” pile contained ideas that were either strategically or tonally off and were easy to shitcan. The “maybe” pile was certainly the hardest because they would require more thinking, craft and elbow grease. Craig and I took that pile and tried to turn the best of it into something befitting the “yes” pile.
Two nights later, our K2 clients — their president and marketing director — squeezed into our windowless hovel of a home and ended up loving the work. We did it! We sold a new national ad campaign that would run in SKI Magazine. That semi-desperate collaboration, where each of us contributed concepts, visuals and actual copy, went on to sells lots of skis and win very shiny creative awards.
Until that point in my career, I had never seen a creative internal where everyone was asked to contribute ideas and comment on them collectively. Even people outside the creative department, especially account executives!
In a typical “dictatorship”, I would be the grand ego in the room. All the creative decisions would be mine, and mine alone. I wouldn’t ask for input. If I did, I probably wouldn’t mean it. And I certainly wouldn’t be asking for ideas from the account people.
In the end, it was not a conscious decision on my part to revolutionize the creative process. I felt I had no choice. But it worked. I look back on that night and realize I was harnessing the creative energy of the entire agency, even if it was only four of us.
A “democracy,” however small, was born.