In 2006 we posted our agency goals for the year on this blog as a public record of what we were setting out to achieve. Needless to say, we didn’t achieve all of it. We thought we would once again risk public humiliation by posting the objectives we have set for Wieden + Kennedy London to achieve in 2007. Belated – yes, I know it’s half way through February – but here they are:
1. Continue to try to produce the best work of our lives, across all of our clients
2. Have our best year yet for revenue. Keep our costs in check.
3. Win a big new account. (Big revenue. Big creative opportunity.)
We’ve won a couple of great new clients already this year: Nokia and Save the Children. We could do with one more big win.
4. Develop our international reach
(i.e. Do more projects with the rest of the W+K network and do more projects outside the UK.)
5. Fully embrace interactive media and turn W+K into the UK’s first agency to offer genuinely integrated, creatively brilliant offline/online campaigns.
(We set ourselves this objective before Christmas and if we don’t get a move on we’ll have missed it before the year even gets going. We’ve done a fair bit of digital work for Honda, Wales, Yakult and others and In Emeco we’ve won our first digital-only client, but we have work to do here.)
6. Do more to share people with other offices
6.
We did a bit of this last year and it was good for the individuals and the network. Must do more in ’07.
7. Do more good
7.
Hopefully we can do a bit more for our people and our community than just making adverts.
8. Find ways of improving our efficiency without compromising on quality
8.
The old question: does it always take a long time and a lot of pain to get to great work? Probably, but we need to find ways of at least minimising the pain.
9. Create our own content and start to create new models for making money from our own content
9.
Another tough one. I’ll be very impressed with our performance if we manage to achieve this in 2007 but we have to try. Projects in development include short film ideas and a book project.
10. Dial up the crazy
10.
As we get older, wiser and bigger we need to make sure that we don’t lose our edge. We need to keep our thinking, our people and our environment fresh, provocative and surprising. If we turn into a mid-sized, middle-of-the-road, mediocre ad agency, we’re dead. We need to keep on walking in stupid.
Well, there they are. Let’s see how we get on this year.
