This is Dr Scott Koslow  BA MBA Mich PhD SCal. (Phew, that’s a lot of letters.)

He’s an Associate Professor of Marketing and International Management from the University of Waikato in New Zealand. He visited Wieden + Kennedy today to talk to a few of us for a study he’s doing into creativity at agencies. His view, if I understood correctly, is that while a lot of academic research has been done into analysing how advertising works, relatively little has been done into how it is created. So he wanted to talk to us about the environment, circumstances and processes that lead to creativity.

My suspicion is that you can’t process creativity. That there is no system that will make the work ‘more creative’. Indeed, you could argue that, if chaos is the friend of creativity, then process is its enemy. What we do have (we hope) is a culture that is founded upon and driven by creativity. Everyone knows that they’re here to do the best work of their life. Because we do good work, we attract clients who want to do more good work, which means we can continue to retain and attract talented people. Not that this is simple. The creative process here is a bit like giving birth. There’s a very long gestation period where nothing much appears to be happening, then at the eleventh hour there’s an excuciatingly painful upheaval involving stress, shouting, tears and blood. This final spasm produces something that on first sight may be a bit odd-looking but which, when we wipe the muck off and consider it closely, often proves to be uniquely beautiful.

In conversation with Dr Scott it appeared that clients are the key influence on the quality of the work their agencies produce. Obvious conclusion, I guess. (Though it’s ususally the agency that gets fired for producing bad or ineffective work, not the marketing director.) Personal experience suggests that while a great client can get good work out of an OK agency, it’s very hard, even for a good agency, to do good work for a bad client.

I remember in a previous job presenting the agency’s creative credentials to someone who had recently been promoted to a senior role at a current client. She asked, ‘How come you do such great work for your other clients and comparatively disappointing work for us?’ Let’s see – the same agency, the same creative people, the same strategists, similar amounts of time and money….what’s the variable here?

I hasten to add that, of course, there are plenty of instances where agencies manage to screw stuff up all on their own without any help from the client. And I should also point out that all of our clients at W+K are great, so if there’s any of our work that you think is disappointing, then it’s our own fault.

On Friday Kim and Neil attended the Clarion Awards ceremony, organised by the IVCA (International Visual Communications Association) and held at BAFTA. These awards recognise best practice in communicating the importance of corporate and social responsibility, sustainability, social inclusion and ethical debate. The awards cover corporate media, mainstream film, TV, radio, the performing arts and advertising. Which is how we came to be there, accepting an award in the advertising category for our ‘Grrr’ film for Honda diesel.

It was a somewhat different type of event from the sort of awards ceremonies to which the ad industry is accustomed. Attended by senior business people, CSR specialists, government types and a few celebs. The awards were introduced by Moira Stuart, which is a bit more classy than the usual ad awards presenters – Jimmy Carr, etc. I was seated next to Nicholas Parsons (nice man) and our award was presented by actress Rita Tushingham of ‘A Taste of Honey’ fame.

Also unusually, winners got to make an acceptance speech. There was even a letter of support from the Prince of Wales, which was read out. A bit like the Academy Awards. Kim refused to have anything to do with this so Neil had to stumble his way through thankyous to Honda UK, for their trust and belief in the power of dreams and to Kenichi Nagahiro, designer of the Honda diesel engine, without the inspiration of whose hate, none of this would have been possible, etc.

The list of other winners was pretty diverse, including Woman’s Hour (for outstanding contribution to radio), The Guardian (for their Living Our Values publication), the movie An Inconvenient Truth, and Unseen UK, a book of photographs by Royal Mail employees.
We try to be a ‘good’ company so it was actually quite an honour to be recognised in these awards.

Kim (above): ‘No way am I going up on that stage.’