It was great to be involved in the Creative Operations Europe 2022 event, supporting the continued development of this essential and evolving business function.
Throughout the agenda we were reminded that creative operations teams are successfully progressing with their journey to shape and influence strategy at the top table. The skills and tools this community are bringing allows brands to successfully pivot in a fast-changing landscape. Providing the competitive advantage needed to successfully feed the continued demand for more quality assets and content.
We were lucky to be entertained and informed by some amazing senior global talent from leading brands and agencies such as Lego, Wayfair IBM and VMLY&R. If you didn’t have a chance to join, I thought you might appreciate my top takeaways:
Danny Fontaine Creative Director IBM in his high energy presentation, focused on Turbo charging creativity and shared with us the importance of creative ways of working such as Divergent thinking, Subconscious thinking and Loonshots (focusing on ideas that seem mad) to drive contagious creativity. His use of storytelling in the presentation was exceptional, giving us all a new way to think. Martin Cappola Global creative lead Lego discussed the importance of harnessing multi-cultural global teams to create their own culture and feed the creative force. Resulting in both working and winning with friends.
Sophie Evans Creative Operations Manager Wayfair focused on the importance of operational KPI’s provide some very practical advice on tracking and reporting. She also commented on the need to leverage data to allow you to speak the same language as your stakeholders. Establishing creative ops as data decision makers in our industry.
Vineet Raheja Head of Creative at ITV discussed different ways of working with large stakeholders and the advantages of squad’s vs waterfall teams allowing a more agile approach.
Matt Jones & Abi Stephenson senior creatives from VMLY&R proved a great double act bring with them not only humour but some fantastic #processhacks. Including advice on scope for the unscopable, keep teams small, no decks until really necessary and bring creatives in “upstream” when the brief is being written.
In summary it was all about the importance of culture, teams and the people in them.
If you would like to chat about your takeouts from the session or discuss any of these points do get in touch.
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