Andrew Missingham is the co-founder of b + a equals, “the fastest, most creative management consultancy in the world”. It’s output agnostic, he says, and that’s where he believes his business model has an edge in this 21st century.
He wants the creative industry and its creative people to sharpen up. He wants creative people he can hire. Missingham delivered that advice in a talk at D&AD today, called Life beyond art-working another f***ing toothpaste ad.
Clearly, Missingham knows how to get your attention too. This is his point of view.
You can’t sharpen a pencil with a pencil. For this industry to stay sharp, it needs things that aren’t pencils and aren’t made of the things pencils are made of. It needs something made out of metal and looks very different.
Firstly, I’m suggesting a new award for D&AD next year – The Sharpener Award. The Sharpener Award should be awarded to someone who has nothing to do with this industry at all but has the kind of perspectives this industry should be listening to and giving attention to. Why? Because it would diversify it, it would open it up. It would create tension and new perspectives that it currently doesn’t have.
I’ve never worked in the ad industry before. Ever. It’s a very odd industry because it’s driven by awards. It’s driven by people who are peers, assessing their peer’s work, handing out awards that have kudos among their peers only. And I actually think that, ironically, that’s one of the things holding it back.
D&AD needs to create an award that applauds say Anthony Joshua the boxer. Say an imam from Whitechapel mosque. Or somebody who has nothing to do with this industry. If we are going to be relevant to people, communicating and convincing people, we need to open up who we are.
I come from a music background. I worked a lot with the music and arts sector. It has a similar challenge to the advertising creative industry in so far as because its people have creative in their title, they think that they are. That tends to mean that they don’t try as hard as they could. I think they get lazy. The arts industry as well. I left the arts industry partly because I was frustrated with that complacency and I recognise that same complacency in a lot of what I see in the advertising and branding world.
Both the creative industry and b + a equals solve business problems. But sometimes we solve those problems by communications. Sometimes by business model. Sometimes by internal business culture in terms of how its people are organised. We’re output agnostic. We don’t create given outcomes. We have tons of suppliers – ad agencies, animators, PR agencies, graphic designers, legal experts whom we hand our strategies onto, but we don’t predetermine what the outcome might be. And we’ve found that’s a very attractive thing in the 21st century. So people who have come into the creative industries and are frustrated, I want them to understand that there are possibilities to scratch their creative itch outside the so called creative industries. I think that’s a very important, very empowering message to give.
