Agency Creativity: Teams and Performance

Abstract

AUTHORS' BIOSJacqueline Lynch is a principal lecturer, department of marketing and business strategy, Westminster Business School, University of Westminster. Her research interests include marketing and logistics, creativity in marketing, and creativity in marketing education. Before making the transition to academia, Lynch ran her own consultancy business and held senior marketing positions across a range of companies, including Nationwide Building Society, British Telecom, and HFC Bank. DouglasWest is a professor of marketing at King's College London and visiting fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford. His research interests include creativity, decision making, marketing budgeting, and risk, and he has published widely on marketing and marketing communications. West is formerly executive editor of the Journal of Advertising Research and continues as contributing editor. ABSTRACTAgency creativity is a product of team efforts where members interact to share knowledge, skills, and expertise to produce creative campaigns. For an agency, this is an invaluable resource. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the authors of the current paper proposed a conceptual model that links teams' knowledge utilization, agency creativity, and performance. By considering incremental and radical creativity, the model also builds on the idea that creativity is a multidimensional construct. The framework is presented to act as a catalyst upon which to build future empirical research on the nature of team creativity within advertising agencies. MANAGEMENT SLANT Team knowledge utilization in agencies is a key resource for agency creativity and performance and needs careful management.  Agencies with strong relational ties have better access to data and consumer insight and have the potential to produce more radical creativity. However, this is contingent on market conditions for the brand.2

Future Directions for Advertising Creativity Research

“…Scholars have investigated how agency social processes influence creative performance with studies looking at traditional sociological issues like social class (Koppman 2016) or gender (Roca et al 2016). Other aspects specific to advertising include: the shared mental models of peers (Stuhlfaut and Windels 2015); the agency creative process (Lee and Lau 2018;Turnbull and Wheeler 2017) and the use of creative teams (Lynch and West 2017). The interaction of creatives with digital technology has also been explored in a study of how Google search both helps art directors and copywriters find relevant information, but can also limit their creative ideas as few understand the algorithm employed and how best to use it (Barker 2018).…”

Resource integration for co-creation between marketing agencies and clients

“…Creativity resources in agencies are largely made up of creative people working in teams within supportive organisational processes (West, 1993;Lynch and West, 2017).…”

Advertising industry evolution: agency creativity, fluid teams and diversity. An exploratory investigation

“…It has also been referred to as the creative quality of agency teams in producing innovative ads (O'Connor et al, 1996, Smith andYang, 2004) which Li, Dou, Wang and Zhou, (2008) refer to as agency creativity -a subset of advertising creativity. For the purposes of this study agency creativity has been defined as "the extent to which agency teams develop radical or incremental ideas (and advertising strategy) to solve clients' problems, as perceived by managers" (Lynch and West, 2017).…”