Our creative director and I were talking the other day, reminiscing about the glory days of how things used to be done – marker comps, keylines, thumbnail sketches, stats… blah, blah, blah. Today it’s all about bandwidth, digital landscapes, app deployment, geofencing, Dropbox, CRM, CPM, SEO, MPEG, PPC, EPS, CC, etc., etc.

It got me thinking about how the new technologies and tools have changed our industry over the years. In my mind, change is good – most of the time. It can make us more efficient by eliminating manual tasks. We can draw a straight line faster, process a photo faster. And certainly correct the 14 typos I had in this piece a lot faster. New technologies, new processes… all these things are supposed to help us do our jobs better. Just think of what the computer has done for all of us in our daily lives … work and personal.

So at the end of the day, what we have is a constant barrage of new tools at our fingertips. And that’s exactly what all this new stuff is, tools. What we do as a creative group of professionals with all these tools is what matters.

One thing ALL these tools will never do is to think. They don’t strategize. They don’t create concepts. They don’t write, they don’t design and they certainly do not listen.
Any agency worth the sticky on their Scotch® Brand Transparent Tape has all the new fun tools, or at least has access to them. They probably wouldn’t be in business, let alone competitive, if they didn’t. It’s how we use the tools that matter. Deciding what offers the most effective results, how certain technologies fit into a bigger picture, or the creative vision one has to manipulate the shutter on a camera – that’s what matters.

It’s the human element: The process of thought. Intelligence. Creativity. That’s what makes any business great.

We have a creative department, public relations, account service, digital departments, etc., but I consider every single person who works, or who has worked, here as creative. They have to be – it’s what we do.

An excerpt from our employee manual:

“We listen. We question. We investigate. We research. We strategize. We design. We write. We build. We manufacture. We produce. We buy. We sell. We listen more.
We create.”

Think about it.