Who is Farhan Lalji?

So sang The Byrds.

Had a delightful dinner with Andy today – or are you going by Andrew these days? Mr T? Andy and I used to work together agency side and client side. We had an interesting conversation which ended with him saying, “sounds like a blog post”. So I felt the need to oblige.  Side note: damn you wrote a post first!

When Andrew and I worked client side, we were really innovative, for local government at least. Actually not just for local government, for the time. We developed an in house CMS, which I then used for my own blog – running on php and mysql. We started a few RSS feeds. We had content managers and editors. It was pretty impressive stuff for the turn of the century.

Then Andy went to work for an agency, and I went to work for an agency and then Andy and I joined the same agency. At the beginning we thought that all the really creative people must be working for agencies.

Quickly we realised that agency work can be stifling for creativity. We learnt that there are a lot of processes and you end up running a lot of the same gambit for different clients. Not because you can’t be creative, but because it’s hard to show the gains of creativity and because time spent being creative and thinking outside the box is time you’re not earning.

So who’s more creative? Is it in house staff, agency staff, or does being independent and contracting lead to more time and energy spent on being creative, which we tried as well?

My take is that things cycle and balance is consistently tipped in industries. Especially on a granular level, the grass is always greener. Either an agency or an in house team can be more creative and at the same time less creative. And we probably go through cycles where agencies are more creative then in house staff – probably when there’s less work going on and more time to focus on the work – and then in house teams can be more creative – probably when agencies are getting too much work, or there isn’t enough money to pay agencies so having a small super in house team makes sense.

Andy and I were client side when the bubble popped in the early part of this decade and I do believe money was tight so creative people were working client side. Working on one project which we could devote all of our time to meant that we could think laterally about what we could do and what would have an impact. Not to say that you can’t work on more than one project and still be innovative and give it the attention that it needs, but at some point you tip the scale and you end up giving less then you should.