Sorry it’s taken so long to reply! Hadn’t seen your comment.

There are some great links there. I’m very interested in shaking up the agency model, as pointed out in an earlier post: http://blog.adamgraham.co.uk/2010/03/the-last-advertising-agency-on-earth/ the trouble is that many of these agencies (including one of the ones on your links above) talk a good game, but the reality is that fundamentally they are just painting over the cracks and until some of the very senior people let go, they will never truly change.

I also like this: http://www.creativesocialblog.com/creative-social/zero-waste-creativity there’s a lot of wasted effort and resource in the current model. Surely there’s a way to work more efficiently? it should be possible to give the client a quicker response, better quality work plus a cost saving if we could get them to buy in to a version of this.

What do you think? any ideas?

I’m very much interested in these kind of developments. An advertsing agency is packed with passionate creative people, about advertising but also very often about something else. The capacity to leverage these “something else” is I guess one of the main competitive advantage for an agency to succeed in this world where building brands has changed like never before.

Bringing a perspective that really changes things is at the core of what we do, and this is more likely to happen in an agency full of people that not only eat advertising. We need to collaborate not only internally, but also externally with our surrounding world, in order to always stay culturally relevant, and offer the best solutions to our clients. Leveraging the passions of the agency workers outside of work to help curate culture and the environment at large, is definitely something worth doing!

Then “how to give people the ownership and belief that they would have if it was their own side project that they did in their spare time”, is a very challenging one, and makes it all the more interesting to tackle!

In addition, I recently came across some very interesting blog posts on the subject, which are definitely worth a shot (you might have read most of them…)

http://bbh-labs.com/get-a-life-whats-your-20-project
http://bbh-labs.com/where-does-the-agency-end-and-the-crowd-begin
http://www.slideshare.net/mutopo/causing-more-mass-collaboration
Turning BBH from a company with a creative department to a creative business
http://www.agencyfuture.com/?p=3102
Interesting agency model for Guided Collective
http://www.agencyfuture.com/?p=3087

Cheers!