It’s a little after half past 2007, the point in the year at which we usually review our progress against the objectives we set for ourselves six months earlier. At the risk of public embarrassment, we posted those on this blog back in February, so we can’t cheat them with the benefit of hindsight. Without wanting to crow, we’re doing pretty well at achieving them so far. Hell, we’re having a great year – we’re entitled to a small helping of crow.

1. Continue to try to produce the best work of our lives, across all of our clients
This is always job number one. And we’ve done pretty well this year at broadening the quality of what we do from a couple of clients to a broad range. We’ve launched new work for Lurpak, Cravendale, The Guardian, Orange and Emeco, among others, that we can be justifiably very proud of. Plus we’ve continued to pull in accolades for our work with long-standing clients, with Honda being named advertiser of the year at Cannes, Nike winning best ad overall at Campaign Press and the ANNAs, plus we got golds at the Andys, pencils at D&AD, our Nike Run London work won best integrated campaign at the Sports Marketing Awards, etc, etc. Arguably we haven’t had a world-conquering blockbuster on the scale of ‘Cog’ yet in 2007, but our portfolio has never been stronger across the board. The key thing for the future is to demonstrate that we can continue to achieve the same standard across even more accounts.

2. Have our best year yet for revenue.  Keep our costs in check.
Current forecasts suggest we will achieve the first of these and though we’re way over budget on freelance fees so far this year, the second is otherwise under control. Even our big building project, the third floor extension, has come in pretty much on target.

3. Win a big new account.  (Big revenue.  Big creative opportunity.)
We’ve had a storming year for new biz: Save the Children, Nokia flagship stores, Visa World Cup sponsorship, The Observer and most recently the Nokia global account. We can count this objective as achieved to the extent that we’re now pretty much closed for new business so we can focus on existing clients.

4. Develop our international reach
With the wins of Visa and Nokia, both of which are global assignments that we’ll run from London, we’re doing well on this. If you add to these our work internationally for Emeco and in Romania for Orange, we can reasonably claim to have become an agency of global scope based in the UK. (And the Honda Choir performed at the Oscars ceremony, which has about as global a reach as you can get.)

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’re working on this one. We’ve done a fair bit of digital work for Honda (Hondamentalism site up and running, plus various other bits of interactive stuff and web content, with more in development), Pizza Hut, Wales (new site to launch soon), Emeco (new site to launch soon), and projects are in development for Cravendale, Nokia and more. We’re also staffing up with interactive talent. We hired AKQA San Francisco ACD David Lee, BBDO Montreal’s head of digital production Jessica Manchester, digital producer Will Misselbrook, and we have two more hires confirmed and starting work shortly, with more to follow. I couldn’t honestly claim that we’ve achieved this objective yet but we’re making real progress.

6. Do more to share people with other offices
There are legal barriers to this but we think it benefits the individuals involved and helps to improve shared culture and good working relationships round the network. So it’s a Good Thing. We’ve done a bit of this, both bringing people into London for a spell from round the network – particularly on the Nokia pitch – and sending our people off to other offices. Big international jobs on Nokia and Visa will enable us to continue to do this.

7. Do more good
We try to do a bit more for our people and our community than just making adverts. This year we’ve started working with Save the Children. We’ve also introduced a new provision to allow staff to take time off to do charity work. And we’ve got involved with a scheme that sponsors our people to visit charities and aid organisations in developing markets to consult on comms issues. Account Director Penny Brough will spend some time in Brazil later this year under this scheme. And we’ve done a lot of work on recycling and the like to reduce our carbon footprint. Combined with offsetting, this should enable us to be at carbon-neutral before teh end of the year.

8. Find ways of improving our efficiency without compromising on quality
The old question: does it always take a long time and a lot of pain to get to great work? Maybe, but we need to find ways of at least minimising the pain. To be honest, this year has probably been as hard as ever in this respect, because we’ve been so busy. This is an area we need to focus on for the rest of the year, to ensure that we find ways of working that will accommodate the increased workload brought by growth, without causing log-jams / meltdown / nervous breakdowns.

9. Create our own content and start to create new models for making money from our own content
This job has been neglected as we’ve focused on client and new biz demands for the first half of the year. But we have made a hiring of someone to drive this area and he’ll be with us later this month. So watch this space.

10. Dial up the crazy
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. In Kim P’s words, we want to stay ‘wrong side of the tracks’. Because the craziness is what generates the big creative leap and what makes this a stimulating, challenging, fun place to work. It can be difficult to remember this when you’re working as hard as we have been recently. But we have absolutely no interest in turning into a big, boring agency. Still crazy (after all these years)? Let’s hope so.

Keep the faith, true believers!