Creation Vs. Curation: Which is best for your brand?

February 10, 2012, 8:55 AM

Creation. It happens quicker than the flip of a switch. Sparks fly and light bulbs go off. An idea is born which best captures your brand’s essence and drives growth for your business. There is something behind “it,” swagger, panache, a certain element that can’t be replicated anywhere else.

“It” is only found at your ad agency.

“It” is the reason you partnered with them.

“It” is their creative capability.

Curation. It’s a recent trend that shifts emphasis from an agency’s ability to create and places that onus on third parties. Instead of producing work internally, “full service” agencies are crowd sourcing design, online expertise and PR strategies, among other things, to a myriad of amateurs and experts who work online or at other firms. Forget having one bearer for your brand, it has been ceded to a fragmented creative process. This raises some questions:

How effective is their creative process?
Are they missing opportunities?
Are there open lines of communication?
Could those marked up dollars for third parties be spent more strategically?

This is advertising’s equivalent of walking down the grocery aisle and picking out a tube of toothpaste. Sure, there are plenty of options on the shelf but they’re all the same. Commodities.

Ultimately, it is the agency’s responsibility to tailor these kernels into the big idea for your brand. If done well this co-creation model could produce effective results, however it lacks the agency’s creative influence throughout the entire process. Isn’t that influence and belief in the agency’s creative product one of the sole reasons you partnered with them in the first place?

Whether it’s the big idea or the strategies and tactics to implement that idea, we’re keeping our full service capabilities in house.

Lets be frank…just how many firms does it take to screw in the “idea” bulb anyway?

Three? Four? How about one? A single firm with a multi-disciplinary team and strategic know how to get “it” done. Just what is “it?” Let’s talk over lunch and figure that out together.

1 Comment

February 15, 2012 4:05 PM
Linda MacMillan says:
You are right,BAM!

Curation is like a bunch of limp vegetables hoping to make a fresh and relevant salad!

The big new brand idea comes from intimate discussions with your ad team partners, not an outsourced group of people in remote pods somewhere. Familiarity breeds great work and memorable advertising and marketing.

Go Burgess!

Linda

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