By Henry Garnett

Last week we were asked to reflect on our music brief and evaluate our own impact within the team to produce the mega-hit super single currently souring through the charts. It was also an interesting twist to have everyone else evaluating you in the group as well. Suddenly I became much more aware of my performance and how I may have been perceived by my compatriots within the team. It was a useful exercise to bring a sense of awareness to how you may have done things better, and the impact you can have on other people when everyone has to pull together towards one goal.

The agency brief was handed in this week and proved to be a similar challenge – big groups of people trying to come together in producing a singular vision for multiple strands of work. With a new group of people, it was great learning how others worked and the kind of dynamics that suited me. I still have no idea. There was some really good work though and we loved seeing how the other groups attacked the brief from a completely different point of view. It highlighted for us where we perhaps went wrong but also showed a few things we got right. We were all agreed on what an amazing opportunity the brief was and how we wanted to push the boundaries but we vacillated trying to achieve a consensus and left it too late to pull it all together. We were left with a vision we were proud of but agreed we didn’t leave ourselves enough time to land the message we wanted to convey.

The stakes were a little higher for this brief maybe that’s why it took us so long to come to an agreement. It was a chance to have your ideas plastered all over the walls of the SCA and define our brand identity for the next year. With time low and the deadline looming it seems we focused too much on craft with the basic idea, we had, as opposed to fleshing it out with as much iteration as possible. This is something we keep getting told but it seems the penny’s dropping slowly. We needed to distill our message down to its core value and cut away more of the fat as opposed to making the fat look nice and sexy. We needed to be more precise and singular with our vision as opposed to presenting a variety of them.

What I found most enjoyable from the brief was learning about the different approaches of everyone in our group. We agreed about many things and then our preferences differed on others but it was interesting to see how everyone navigated that space and which battles they chose to fight. Hopefully, we’ll all learn from it and I can’t wait to see who wins.