Campaign asked some agency founders what they would do if they were to start an agency again today - here’s what Naked founder Will said:

WILL COLLIN - NAKED COMMUNICATIONS

The world has changed a lot in the eight years since Naked started.

Genuine structural change in people’s media behaviours has come about through the arrival of Freeview, social networking and the mainstream adoption of broadband to name but three obvious examples.

Add to those other emergent trends such as blogging, user-generatedcontent and the mobile internet, and it’s not surprising that the typical campaign today looks a whole lot different from the kinds of things we were doing when Naked first began.

So what would I do differently if I were starting out now? Nothing. I’d do the same again. I’d start an agency focused on solving the client’s communications problems, not on selling a predetermined solution. I’d build a diverse team with a mix of skills from a range of disciplines. And I’d recognise that creativity should be part of the agency’s
culture, not the name of a department.

The profound changes in the ways people use and are influenced by communications simply confirm the logic of communications strategy being a distinct discipline, unbiased towards any particular discipline and unshackled by fixed investments in specific delivery mechanisms.

The accelerating pace of change means that any attempt to build an agency to deliver “the next big thing” is doomed to be superseded by the next next big thing, and so on. The willingness to embrace any and every
channel without bias is the only guarantee that your agency will be as relevant to the communications landscape of 20 years’ time as it is to today’s.

Objectivity is future-proof.