What’s the Strength of an Advertising Agency?
A few weeks ago, I finished the first project for my design studio class for this semester. In order to bolster our research ability, our assignment was to make a proposal to gain 50,000USD funding for research. Since we need to work on a thesis project called IDEP(Independent Design Engineering Project) during the second year at MDE, this assignment was created as a preparation for this thesis project.
As usual, our cohort broke down into several teams to tackle this assignment, and while I participated in the project, there were key learnings I encountered and thought of writing down a few things.
As Someone Coming from an Agency, What am I Good At?
Since applying to graduate school, there was something I was wondering for a long time. When working with people with interdisciplinary backgrounds, for someone like me, what is the advantage of coming from an advertising agency?
When I started graduate school, part of me thought the answer to this is being creative. So while I was working on finding precedents for potential ideas, I would present projects that have one famous advertising awards such as Cannes Lions. In another class discussion, I would draw my agency experience as a reference point for discussion.
For this project, I teamed up with an ex IBM consultant and a UX designer who studied architecture at Berkeley.
Approaching Studio Project
To be honest, this assignment was hard. Unlike the previous assignments we had last semester, instead of presenting a solution, this assignment is developing a proposal to win a research grant. Personally, I tend to jump to presenting a solution, but my team members who are more versed in design research brought me back to the right track. Frankly, their refined discussion helped me a lot to move forward with the project.
As someone, not a consultant nor a researcher, instead of lamenting my lack of ability, I was struggling to put something on the table to help the team. As a result, I ended up making a comprehensible “story” to present to the instructors after having a lengthy and discussion with the team members.
The Ability to Tell a Story
This lead me to realize something. What is the strength of someone coming from an advertising agency? In my opinion, that is the ability to tell a story.
It kind of makes sense. At the end of the day, the job of an agency is to bring an integrative solution from a complex problem by addressing every stakeholder involved. To strive in such a difficult situation, it was always important to tell a story so that all of these stakeholders would be engaged.
This ability to tell a story was something required for all professionals within the agency. Both when I was an account executive and a creative technologist, telling a story was important. I needed to tell a story to the client, and I also needed to tell a story through the use of technology.
Even I left the advertising agency and came to an environment where different people with different background come together, the importance of storytelling is never undermined. No matter how difficult the problem I’m working on is complex, there is always a necessity to communicate the solution to people in a clear, engaging manner. Storytelling is an essential ability to overcome this obstacle.
For this project, I spent a lot of time on trying not to lose the deepness of the discussion we had as a team but also tried to make our point very clear and worked on the presentation to communicate our story in an engaging manner.
Although it was a relatively short project, I am content that we were able to move forward efficiently by leveraging each other’s s expertise. In addition, I learned a lot through the process of research and this was a great takeaway from the project as well.
