Hive Health

Creative Director Adam Lach-Szyrma looks at the ingredients agencies need to produce greater work and ensure clients come back for more.

Your client’s the fussy customer at table 10. You’re the rushed off-your-feet waiter. The creative’s are the chefs, sweating away in the kitchen. Your customer is mulling over their order and the clock is ticking. And the place is heaving. Anxious to please, and to serve everyone, you suggest the cod. It’s quick and easy and tastes OK, but you know it’s nothing special. You take the order to the kitchen. The chefs, also anxious to please, suggest a wonderful lobster instead. You go back to the customer with their inspired thinking. The customer, mind and wallet now firmly set on the cod, gets all uppity. You tell the chefs to forget the lobster. They get all uppity. You’re caught in the middle.

As usual.

The hasty suggested and pre-determined order isn’t necessarily the best solution. It could also be a missed business opportunity. Perhaps we could start by holding back from suggesting anything until we’ve had a think, and a preliminary chat with the team back at the agency. Yes, it becomes less about process, more about ideas. And everyone contributes. After having our think, and our chat, we can ask the client the kind of questions that make them think too. The client feels more engaged. A tighter brief ensues, which the client feels part of because we get them to sign it off. When we brief the creative’s, we know we already have some client buy-in, and a firm grasp of the issue. Our informed enthusiasm brings the brief to life for the creative’s, who work harder to conjure something special. We feel a greater sense of ownership of the ideas, which we push with added confidence, knowing the client’s half way on board. Working smart like this, Hive thrives. We gain a reputation for questioning, probing and challenging clients, in all the right areas and for all the right reasons. We give clients what they need rather than what they want. The creative work stands out. Better still, it works. We operate more as a consulting partner than as a supplier, adding value to our services and satisfaction to our days. To make this happen we need two very different hats. The first is our day-to-day hat. It’s for the day-to-day work that will never get us anywhere near a podium. The second is our ‘client wants fine dining’ hat – our creative and strategic thinking cap. These hats are very different, and require very different skills. We need both in equal measure. And we need to seize every opportunity to wear the second hat.

Share the Chef’s hat. The waiters might be out front with the customers and the chefs back there in the kitchen, but they’re all in the same restaurant, working together to give the customer the best dining experience they can. There’s no ‘them and us’, no ‘master and servant’. You get my drift.

One couldn’t function without the other, and vice versa. Creative’s aren’t the only ones who think creatively, just as the Account Handlers aren’t the only ones who think strategically. It’s a team thing. We’re all working together to serve up the best work.

When chefs are asked to prepare a special meal for someone they don’t know, the first thing they do is find out what that particular person likes and dislikes. They then think carefully about how the food should look, smell and taste, in order to appeal to that person, and how they want the person to feel throughout the dining experience. In this way, great chefs ‘become’ their diners.

At Hive, we have to keep remembering that the person we’re preparing the dish for IS NOT our client. A fundamental difference. So fundamental, it’s why clients use creative agencies.

It’s time for us all to get creative in the kitchen.

I stumbled upon this looking for guys to help me with a current project. The film covers collaboration, inspiration and the need for innovators to have lots of hobbies. Something I can embrace fully.

The star of the film; Author Steven Johnson talks on the launch on his new book covering the myths and rules of innovation. The book spans a huge period in history, ranging from the invention of double entry accounting, and Gutenberg’s printing press in the 15th century, through to Tim Berners Lee and the world wide web, and ultimately YouTube.com.

If you have 5 mins, and are interested in innovation and history  its well worth a friday afternoon muse, I have the book on order, so will fill you in, when I am through it.

I have been in Rome this week doing market research for a global/regional client. It’s been a mix of days spent behind mirrored glass, and late evenings in local restaurants getting to know each other.

Having secured a few hours one evening my two angels of clients (both Italian) forced me to walk Roma, taking in Parliaments after Parliament, copious coffees and cobbled streets filled with chit-chat and random historical facts. We walked for ages, dedicated to strolling, our only purpose filling time.

For me it’s been really sacred – frankly rather touching. It seems too rare to really have down time to blur the boundaries between hourly rates and working with mates. It’s made me ponder about the ‘usual’ relationship, and the structures that we should put in place to help build teams beyond briefs and POs but at a higher more human level. We are pretty good at mixing business and pleasure here at Hive. But it struck me this week that it’s the bits in between work that really make for a good relationship and the sharing of common interests that drive genuine partnership.

Today I shopped around D&AD New Blood with our creative director Adam. New Blood is a graduate design and advertising showcase. Adam was keen to find names for our talent database, I wanted to photograph some visual storytelling.

VS is a big thing in my mind right now, and I’m turning over what it actually means. Are paintings visual stories? Is an ad a story only when there’s no dialogue or text? I deliberately blurred my shots so that I won’t be able to read the text (if any) when I look at them later.

But I didn’t need my camera to understand more. My creative writing tutor says a story needs a beginning, middle, an end and a problem to solve. So, I spent some time with the visual stories I really liked. The first was from the celebrated young illustrator Jay Wright from UWE Bristol. His poster, The Tin Lungs You Don’t Have, showed me two lungs, each framing a day-in-the-life of (right) a non-smoker and (left) his unhappy counterpart. Each had a different lifestyle, and each ended the day on a different outcome. I am not sure I grasped everything Jay was trying to do here. But as a fresh take on the usual anti smoking brief, this was a masterpiece of a wordless story.

I loved the work for WWF by Middlesex Uni’s  Shamas Bedi. Giant pencil drawings of “cuddly” sea creatures: a turtle, a blue whale, were minutely composed of hundreds of different species. There was  plankton –  those charismatic little guys – corals, feeder fish, penguins, sharks  and seabirds. My conscience didn’t need to read “Save our coral reefs” to jiggle fragile ecosystems up a notch – although the line was there. Enough was spelt out in the drawings within drawings, all immaculately proportioned and wittily placed. Life isn’t in the big details and sometimes that can hit home like a gush of salty water up the nose.

I’m a copywriter but I want to tell my stories more visually.  Pictures take us back to being tiny kids when everything was a picture, even each letter of a word.  Visual storytelling is strong because it leads you directly to the prize. It’s vulnerable because you might not follow. It’s got real heart and I love it.