One of the main reasons for the general lack of posts in the recent (and, in fact, the not-so-recent) past is we've been pitching like crazy. Which is good. Our win rate is OK - above average so that's nice too. But if we won everything, we'd be all over the front - and back - of Campaign every week. You wouldn't hear the end of us.
One of the reasons I think is lack of time on some of these pitches. Gone are the days of 4 or 6 week pitches it seems, and hello 4 or 6 days. If we're lucky. The challenge then, is not just 'fast strategy'. I define fast strategy (probably wrongly) as non-obvious strategy. Finding the right or obvious answer is ultimately not that hard - but taking a leap beyond that, with some rationale for doing so, with no time at all, is the hard bit. Not least because everyone else's innate caution filters tend to kick when we're going a hundred miles an hour.
But from talking with John recently, it's the 'fast creative' bit agencies need to come to turn with - i.e. deriving non-obvious creative solutions, blooming quickly.
Dick Foster used to run McKinsey in the US and wrote a book about creative destruction. While this was mainly focused on creative solutions to business (process) problems, his views about collective genius might be the answer to fast creative. Rather than brief creative teams and let them run with pitch briefs, perhaps we should put the entire department in a room and brainstorm (run by the planners) all the obvious creative routes.
Let's get all the ones off-brief, or with their strategic knickers showing, or the boring ones, or the student ideas, or whatever, on the walls and on the table and out of the way. The give the creative teams the hours or days they have left to nail something interesting, original and non-obvious.
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