I love this topic, not because it is a recurring, provocative, adrenalin-pumping one that gets people across the room all fired up, but because it makes us all pay attention to how we conduct our business, whether or not we are in advertising.

Whenever I speak to people in advertising –meaning the ad agency crowd– they tell me how the shake up in the message creation and media targeting isn’t reflected in the way their agencies are run. The specializations that these ad/communications agencies have brought in, still operate as semi-independent camps.

It therefore comes as a pleasant surprise to hear an established ad man, Jack Klues (from Starcom Media Vest) say that the process of generating Creative work (that which moves from a client service brief, to ‘Creative,’ to Production, to Media) is obsolete. We all know that ideas don’t need to be generated by the idea chiefs, so why do ad agencies only deem a small clutch of people ‘Creatives?’

Break the silos! Dismantle the assembly line! Let creative ideas flow through every pore of the agency! That’s essentially what Klues said in his address to the 4As conference this month.

“The ability to conceive a great idea isn’t limited to someone who has the words ‘creative’ or ‘copy’ or ‘art’ in their title.”

He goes on to say that “an office relocation won’t improve our ability to find the consumer.” 

How does this apply to marketing communications? Not too long ago I heard someone ‘remind’ an account manager to leave the marketing decisions to the marketing people. The manager backed off. It sounded so eighties, and so presumptuous –almost as if only those with brains outfitted with a special chip could even begin to understand the consumer.

Having been on both sides of the fence –and had those dubious ‘creative,’ ‘copy’ and ‘creative’ prefixes to my title, I often jump in to undo the damage, telling everyone in the organization that they have a the same ‘right’ as me to contribute to the branding, or to the campaign. But I don’t hear it said enough, as I evangelize the idea of branding as something you do from the inside-out rather than the other way around.

MarCom people can tap the creative energy of everyone, if they would only break out of their own assembly-line mentality. Marketing Communications is about finding and implementing creative solutions across a wide range of communication channels. If we recognize that ‘Everything Communicates’ then we have to empower everyone to communicate, too, no matter what silo they (still) work in.