Aligning creativity and business

Consumer experiences are becoming more complex with disintermediation of products and services. Moreover, marketing departments are changing to be more analytical across live sales cycles. This calls for a new type of advertising professional.

Brad Dessington: The way products are developed has changed.

As a result, we have seen many agencies embrace and move to an integrated marketing communications offering. But this is not enough; agencies increasingly need to be more flexible in the way that they approach clients' solutions. It's less about creating all things for everyone but rather the ability to provide the right advice, says Rogue CEO, Brad Dessington. He says the key to successfully achieving this lies in the people of the agency.

Turning product development on its head

"Dynamic, solution-driven people are needed. More and more business is looking for hybridised thinkers, or design-based thinking."

To demonstrate this, he uses the example of developing a banking product. "In the past, a new home-loan product would have been thought out in the business and then pushed onto consumers. Not in today's world; today the process is the other way around, and starts outside of the business with the consumer travelling back into the business." Every touch point, gaps in experience and the eventual conversion needs to be considered. The people behind this thinking, agency people, need to understand more about traditional, business systems and new media throughout the value chain.

Lateral creative thinking

This requires a journey that is one of lateral creative thinking from dynamic individuals with diversified marketing experience. "Companies today are better at industrialising their business while quickly moving into the age of creative intelligence, which requires people to have multi-faceted skills on a macro level," he says.

What do these individuals look like? Contrary to popular belief, if they sport a beard and tight trousers, it does not go without saying that they are innovative thinkers. The person required in this new age is also not necessarily right- or left-brained. "It is an oversimplification that right brainers are creative and land up in agencies while left brainers are analytical thinkers and land up as 'business people'."

Use your whole brain rather than just half of it

The belief that a person is 'a creative' because they are right-brained is a myth. The reality is that you are truly creative if you access both sides of your brain. A study at the University of Utah showed that innovative thinkers and great ideas do not necessarily come from right-brained people. Dr Jeff Anderson, director of the fMRI Neurosurgical Mapping Service at the University of Utah, suggests it is the connections among all brain regions that enable humans to engage in both creativity and analytical thinking.

Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs and Richard Branson are all examples of people who used or - in the case of Branson, use - both sides of their brain. Dessington says if you are taught this, your ability to influence business is greater. "However, it is rare to find an individual who is good at both strategy and the creative. The idea has always been you chose one or the other, not both. Now it is about a broader perspective than just the one or the other, and applies entire brain thinking instead of having to choose."