The situation

We're Creatives. We're Here. We're Weird. Cool?

Porter Novelli needed to codify and deploy their Creative team as a distinct offering. In the age of dying Agencies of Record, account services were being cut up between agencies and farmed out to the cheapest bidder. To create understood value in the stellar creative team by clients and account managers alike, we were charged with creating the Porter Novelli Creative as a separate capability and offering.

The final technology

Two main technological deliverables came from this project.

The first deliverable was the creation of a publicly facing, self-promotion page to instill value and thought leadership in the Porter Novelli Creative team. The webpage is simple, clean, easy to manage and hosts a blog as well as a work portfolio section. While not ground shattering, the level of effort and return on investment was great given the logistical challenges and re-vamps in internal organization.

The second deliverable is an internal project management and resourcing system. This system allows non-producers and producers alike to submit work requests to the creative team. These tickets are then routed to the appropriate producer and flagged through the system for the weekly production resourcing meeting. Resources (both internal and external), budget, and timeline are tracked in the system during the life of the project. The resourcing inventory accounted for in the system is a comprehensive evaluation of every person, freelancer, and vendor available for use by a producer, to allow for clarity in bandwidth and high traffic accounts. At the conclusion of each ticket, deliverables are attached, learnings noted and archived, to then associate previous projects with each resource for future project team assignment.

*representative example of production meeting

Internal Organization

Coordinating across 6 continents was a challenge, but we made it work.

We formalized a reporting structure and determined a lead for Creative team organization, who was responsible for inventorying every creative asset (internal or external) with skills, location, mobility, and previous campaigns tagged. Each office location had a lead that was responsible for ensuring communication with the head creative office and production office.

We used the formalized reporting structure to create monthly creative townhalls that were capped at 1 hour max to ensure time was used productively. The time was leveraged for updates on creative process, new business, awards, and resource changes.

We also used this improved structure to improve the weekly production resourcing meetings, which allowed all production leads to sort out on resources and ensure that creatives (which included developers and freelancers) were not overworked.

The creative asset inventory was leveraged to create the internal project management tool and facilitate the production resource meetings.

BRANDING

The Jack's Garage brand was created primarily as a brain child of the Associate Creative Director for North America. Regular reporting was done with the heads of Creative - North America, EMEA, and Global.

We worked together to ensure that all deliverables for the development team and content marketing teams were fulfilled in the final asset delivery and launch date was not altered for the team.

The brand was then codified in brand guidelines and rules, and communicated to the global creative team.

Content - blogging + Portfolio

The two main components to the publicly facing website are blog posts and work posts.

Blog posting was determined by trending topics research by the PN Analytics team by looking at competitive PR and Creative Agencies. Each office had a blog contribution quota to hit each quarter based on the number of creatives in each office and general prompt topics were fielded to the team. The posting schedule was determined between the production and content teams, leveraging analytics team research and bandwidth of the contributing teams.

Work posts were selected in a partnership between the Global Head of Creative and the Production team. Work to showcase was sponsored by a producer, with specific featured capabilities noted, and team members included. Work was then up-voted by the larger creative team and selected for publication by the Global Head of Creative.

Lastly, the Internal Organization Team lead was charged with ensuring that content was received, reviewed, approved, and posted in a timely manner.

continuing efforts

Jack's Garage was designed largely as an internal process and team management initiative. The project lead to the systemic codification of all creative deliverables - from presentations to pitch decks - that inspired other internal teams to follow suit.

The internal resourcing system will continue to be improved upon through semi-annual product testing and surveying of the production team. The internal resourcing system is also set-up to manage closed internal work sample sharing, to highlight capabilities for projects that are not yet allowed to be published.

The final extension of the creative brand was PN 'Premier' for top tier clients. This 'Welcome to Porter' box was an extension of the full Porter Novelli brand in a physical box that showcased all capabilities, contractual obligations, and account team.