S01E02 — How to be a creative from Pantin to NYC
The way creatives work here in New York is amazing, and I learn a lot everyday from my coach who brings me to all the meetings and lets me take part
throughout the process of creation (briefs, reviews). I can give my opinion and propose ideas. I realize that I am very lucky to be able to participate in all of this and it feels a bit like home. These first two weeks allowed me to see the differences between New York and how we actually do things in Betc.
The main reason for these differences is that almost one year ago, Betc moved from Paris to Pantin (the new Brooklyn as they said :) It was an opportunity to review the organisation of the agency and the processes. New tools were put in place to facilitate all the exchanges (exchange between people, exchange of files…). The way of working has also changed: everyone works with their laptop wherever they want, depending on what they have to do, the times of the day, their desires and the organization of each team. You can choose to sit in front of the canal, at the canteen or on the rooftop for example. Destabilizing for some at first, a source of creativity for others. It’s a huge gap from what it used to be, and we’re still testing and learning to improve how we work. Personally I find it to be a very modern way to work and I would probably have a hard time getting back to what it used to be.
I’ll try to explain the main differences between Betc Pantin & Havas New York, from a creative eye point of view:
Awards, bottles of champagne, dog pictures, cups, family photos, souvenirs— you can find everything on a creative’s desk at Havas New York.
In Betc it used to be exactly the same but now, as we have a new organisation and a new way of work, we don’t have our own desks anymore. Instead, any desk can be yours which means that you have to adopt the “clean desk” way of life: every day when you finish work (and normally when you have a meeting or go to lunch), you have to put away all everything from your desk so that anyone can sit there and work, even the CEO. It’s less personal, but you get used to it.
Definitely not the most important part of the creative work… but still important!
Here in New York you sometimes see dogs walking in the office. In Pantin, bees are flying around and making honey on the roof. Funny in both cases.
In Havas New York, you’ll probably find creatives at their desk or in some of the meeting rooms (if there are free ones). There is also a big couch with some video games to play during lunch break! (So cool!)
If you’d like to find someone in the “Magasins généraux” (the Betc building), I hope that you’ve got time! Betc Digital’s teams have created an application that allows employees to interact, see each other’s agendas, find their way around the agency, and locate people in the building (but don’t worry, you have to accept to be located first).
That’s a huge difference between my office back home and here in New-York: punctuality.
In Havas New York, meetings begin and finish on time (most of the time), whereas even if we really do our best in Paris to start meetings on time, we often begin late. I have to confess that I am the first to have to work on that.
In New-York, it’s kind of a show. Creatives live out their scripts and you live it out with them. I’ve fallen in love with the way they tell stories here.
In Paris, it’s more technical with very nice presentation materials, a lot of animations and some great mechanics of how it’s gonna work. It’s also really different because I don’t work on the same kind of projects as I usually do (commercials in New York / activations and social in Paris).
Pretty different tools are used here compared to Paris. All the presentations here are worked on through Google Docs with no internal server. In Paris, since we are in Pantin (one year now) people are trained to put all of their files inside Box. In case someone is missing for any reason, you can find the latest version of their work in their documents. But, I have to say, there is still some resistance toward Office 365 — for some reason people prefer Google Docs at the moment. At Betc we also use Jabber as an internal messaging service, but Slack is beginning to be used more and more.
I’m on a team working on a big group with a lot of different brands inside so, most of the time, creatives are working on the same client. On my team at Betc Digital, we work on a lot of different brands in different sectors, jumping from one subject to another. There is good and bad in both cases. When you work on only one client, the good thing is that you know your subject and how to talk about it well. On the other hand, some creatives get tired of turning around the same subject and sometimes need renewal.
