baa baa h

sheepish

i always thought that i would be better suited to a smaller agency. i remember being deeply skeptical when faced with the statement that to work at bbh you need to be good and nice but from the 4 days that i was there everyone, bar none, was lovely and clearly very in tune with what they were doing.

on the first day of our strategy workshop we met ross and adèle who ran us through bbh's work, from that levi's ad to the recent british airways home advantage campaign. they passed on to the legendary jim carroll who talked to us about insight and the different places that it can be found.

"advertising shouldn't be a perfect demonstration of human behaviour."

jim reiterated that strategy is about story telling and that you need a narrative to take people on journeys. the process of condensing thought, distilling down and being concise are core skills for being a strategist. this compression will allow the creatives to think big. this advice was really useful as we were then briefed by agathe on our task for the week, which was to write a creative brief for axe and then discuss it with a creative team at the end of the week.

we then heard from carl and priyanka about their experience planning at bbh and tips on how to brief creatives. carl believes that natural curiosity and emotional intelligence makes someone worth listening to. i particularly liked this idea of the creativity within an agency:

writer        poet        painter

suit        planner     creative

priyanka advised us to get feedback on our brief from the creatives and not from another planner, to not be precious or defensive but to see it as a starting point. she emphasised the importance of always having a north star of the direction in which you want to head.

this was the first time that we were presenting to creatives rather than as if it were to the clients and dropping our guards to make it an informal chat was quite a challenge but we were given a lot of guidance and structure to get us there. going on the hunt for 13 year old boys was one of the mini adventures that made up a fantastic worksop week. bbh was not at all what i had been expecting, it completely lacked the holier than thou pretention and instead felt like a well constructed, exciting place made up of fun and interesting people. it is definitely a place that i would love to be a part of.

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