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As Director of Strategy at AKQA, Craig Walmsley is responsible for research, insight, proposition formulation and user experience development across AKQA's service offerings. A veteran of the digital industry, he has worked on such clients as Microsoft, Xbox, Orange, Dockers, and Shockwave, developing solutions on multiple digital platforms. As well as working in the digital industry, he is a published writer and historian, with a Doctorate in the History of Philosophy.

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Delivering Digital: The New Agency “Director”

Written on
Jul 11, 2006 
Author
Craig Walmsley  |
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Delivering Digital: The New Agency “Director”

With audiences fragmenting, technologies diversifying and complexity increasing, it’s tough out there for a Brand. Tougher still is the job that agencies face — they are having to come up with more and more complex solutions to meet Brands’ requirements and consumers’ demands. As the complexity of solutions increase, agencies are dividing their labor into niche, specialist segments. Where once there was just a “creative”, doing pretty much everything that appeared on a screen, now there are four or five people specializing in discrete tasks — IA, visual layout, art direction, motion design, animation, 3D modeling, etc. Take a mid-sized mid-complexity project for a brand like Nike — say, an online shoe ordering service.

In an average agency this project could draw upon upwards of 10 different job roles — account manager, project manager, researcher, strategist, information architect, visual designer, motion designer, flash developer, coder, database manager, systems integrator. Suppose that you want to do something a bit more “creative” — then you are getting into art directors, copywriters, shooting film clips, green screens, and all that jazz. Something a bit more technically demanding and you’ll need technical architects, software engineers, QA folks, tracking analysts, and several species of web developer (HTML, java, perl). Not to mention the specialists that might have to be employed to develop mobile solutions, or something whizzy on interactive TV.

Moreover, the delivery of digital is now much more of a mesh of complex interconnections. Technical platform constrains creative execution, strategy determines information design, branding shapes user experience, customer need drives business opportunity, business realities inform technical possibilities. Consequently, each of these job roles now depends intimately on all the others. For example, creating an interaction model for a new User Interface may require a blend of information, motion and visual design, informed by a detailed understanding of the operating system the model will be deployed upon.

Delivering digital is becoming a lot more like making a movie — with lots and lots of people doing more and more specialized tasks. This division of labor means one person is really good at the one really complicated thing that they do. With lots of highly skilled people doing their own thing really really well, theoretically the quality of the product overall should increase. However, dividing labor like this also means that no one person is now responsible for the delivery of the digital experience in its entirety. Everyone does their part, but no-one looks after the whole.

Which brings us back to Film Directors — they don’t act, write the script, shoot the film, dress the set, do the make up, light the scene, write the music, add the special effects, pay the bills, or get everyone to work on time. Except for the above noted shouting of “Action” and “Cut” at opportune moments, they don’t do any of the myriad specialist tasks required to make a movie.

Film Directors do two things: 1) they have a vision for the film and 2) they understand all the interdependencies inherent in making a movie. They are acquainted with what everyone else does on the movie, and how a decision on any one point in the development process can significantly influence the outcome of the movie as a whole.





Reader Comments.

Spot on. Any agency that doesn’t get this (nor retain people who do get it and can play this role) will work harder vs. smarter. But hey, they’ll survive, like they always will but why does everyone keep banging their head against a wall as if working collaboratively and multidisciplinary is rocket science? It’s not, as Craig points out above. Just needs folks to put their egos and silo mentalities to one side and trust in that one person. She/he is doing so in order to allow each discipline to have an environment to do their best work. Nuff said. Great article.

Posted by Jane | 12:42 pm on November 18, 2006.

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