BOARDS: What have been the biggest changes that everyone has seen in the business recently?

Greg Hahn: I've been noticing that clients are more open to different ways of solving problems. They used to come to us with a media plan and a brief and say, "Fill these holes." Now they say, "Here's our problem, figure out the best way to get the message out there." Even if it's not a message, if it's an idea for a product, clients are open to different types of solutions. When I got here, we would present that kind of stuff and it would make for a great meeting but no one would ever do anything with it. Now they expect it and they ask for it, which makes it a lot more fun and a lot easier.

Jae Goodman: It's really interesting to hear Greg's opening comment because our business is built around that and the fact that clients are starting to open up to new ways of doing business. So we are incredibly busy executing what were those "back of the book" ideas in advertising over the last decade.

BOARDS: Rob, Crispin's had a big year in terms of expanding into new fields, with the addition of the PR division and product design to your offering...

Rob Reilly: I think PR has always been a part of Crispin, way before I got here. PR is our biggest creative weapon, so we've added some people who are a little more specialized in it. It's sort of been the agency's strategy. We just have a few bigger clients now and it seems to be a bit more in the limelight. The harder part seems to be that when you get with bigger clients they have their own PR agencies... those are trickier waters. You don't want to step on toes, but the whole DNA of the agency is getting people to talk about brands.

BOARDS: It's interesting that everyone seems to be saying that clients are being brave in a time of economic downturn. You wouldn't necessarily expect that.

Greg: I think they're willing to take risks as long as they see results from it. With the recession and the times they're really focused on results. Everyone's under a lot of pressure so you have to have someone who believes in branding as a long-term as well as a short-term proposition. It's not just a luxury.

Al MacCuish: I'm not sure anything's changed. Money doesn't make you more or less creative. Money is just money. You solve the problem you're given with the resources you've been assigned. If you're worrying about what something costs you're probably focusing on the wrong thing.

BOARDS: Another big change has been the increasing way in which technology is being leveraged and used in messaging. How do you keep on top of that?

Al: Technology is the best way of keeping on top of technology, but it's still only a tool. You can get caught up in trying to be in the most innovative channels but it's only really relevant if that's where your audience is. Brands can end up looking like a dad dancing at a wedding. There are still lots of unexplored existing formats out there worth exploring. Like musicals. The team behind "Pot Noodle the Musical" - as in the Mother lot and the Unilever lot - are as good an advertisement for adventurousness as I've seen. What possessed them to collectively think that anyone would queue up outside the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh at the height of the Fringe Festival to see a one-hour musical paid for by a freeze-dried pasta snack? Well, probably that sense of adventure.

Rob: The media people really have to be on top of that. They have to be bringing us not necessarily [just] the media plan, but things that are happening within the digital space that we can take advantage of. Our solution has been to have the media people be just as creative as the creative people. We've started to put creative teams with developers and producers and they sit together in one cramped, almost illegal office.

Greg: Where we've had the most success is in having someone come up with a cool idea, and they'll figure out a cool technology that adds to that idea. If you start with a technology you end up with a gimmick. I really think if you sit down and [think of] what would be really cool to do, or have a great insight, then people bring you things that seem right for that idea rather than finding the cool technology and trying to write to it.

Jae: We are very lucky that by virtue of where we sit everyone wants to show us the latest, newest thing. So we make it an absolute practice to put as many creative people in those rooms as possible. Whether it's new facial recognition technology that's going to drive what animated features look like five years from now [or something else], we're seeing that all the time. Just within the marketing group, we're staffed to really pay attention to emerging technology, so one of our colleagues is straight out of the MIT Media Lab. He doesn't have a title; he's just the guy from MIT Media Lab who knows a lot more about tech than we do. Often, the core idea will come from him, or from anybody.

BOARDS: Rob, Crispin recently branched into media ownership, buying a stake in online TV channel AmericaFree.tv [see "Topic"]. Why?

Rob: We're always looking for new ways to grow the business. As a new partner, I'm certainly looking for ways to grow and get bigger without getting worse. It's amazing how big BBDO is and yet is still able to innovate year after year and create great work. So we're always looking at partnerships and product development, becoming owners of it and [finding] different ways in. With younger companies like AmericaFree.tv, where you have an opportunity to get in on the ground, we look for those alongside the VWs and the Burger Kings and the Microsofts. I think it's a mixture.

BOARDS: What about everyone else?

Jae: We have an entire department that creates businesses both online and in the real world. We created FunnyOrDie.com in part because our biz dev guys were saying they'd hear from their friends in media that consumers, particularly online, are looking for filters. So we took a look at the web [and] at how funny stuff obviously works, and Will Ferrell was really interested in being in that business. So now a lot of non-CAA clients, among them Judd Apatow, are in the digital business online. That is media. That company now has its own management and sales organization and they're out selling ad space and sponsorship against that media. We feel no pressure whatsoever to offer that to our other corporate clients, but if it makes sense it's certainly someplace we would suggest or send them to check out on their own.

BOARDS: Al, Mother has always been pretty creatively entrepreneurial, most recently with the musical and graphic novel (Four Feet From a Rat). Can you talk about that and what it offers clients?

Al: We've always said that we wouldn't ask clients to do something for their brand that we wouldn't do for our own. So the toys, books and hot dog stand have been ways of demonstrating that, and that can give clients more confidence when something like it is suggested. The hidden value in these sorts of ventures though, apart from being a lot of fun - and in the case of Dogmatic, delicious [Dogmatic is a gourmet hot dog stand owned and run by Mother] - is that it gives us the chance to learn, usually pretty quickly, about the business of manufacturing toys, publishing books and running hot dog stands. You just never know when that sort of thing might come in handy.

BOARDS: Speaking of diversifying, how are your creative departments changing?

Rob: I don't know what the hell we're doing (laughs). I joke, but chaos has always been our situation. I think it's a hard thing because we've experimented and hired people outside of the traditional spaces, some people that have crazy books. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's more work. As many things as we do outside TV and print, there's still a ton of those things that need to get done and be great. How much can you invest in the bizarre, the nontraditional? The speechwriters, the journalists - where do you bring them into the process? Greg probably deals with this as well. You want to push into those spaces to keep yourself fresh, but we've got so much to do that you have to weigh things. Do I want a guy who knows how to make great TV and can do some digital, or do I get a guy who's a speechwriter or a journalist and throw him into the creative department and see how it works? It's a struggle, and we're trying to find the right balance.

Greg: We haven't found the perfect formula either. I always like to bring the planners in early and get a good strategy, something interesting... and digital too. It doesn't always work out to have three or four people in a room throwing around ideas; the dynamics of it are sometimes off. It's not like magic happens, like when they first brought art directors and copywriters together for the first time. It's not happening that way. To Rob's point of bringing in outside influences, that works, but sometimes you bring TV and movie writers in and they write first-year ad student stuff. These guys are great at what they do and then they try and write ads and it's [like] how we all started out - they do bad ads.

Jae: First of all, I have the magic formula here, but it will cost you $8,000,000 each (laughs). To everyone's point, it all starts with people who have experience working on brands. I don't think that just because we're in Hollywood and make hit movies and television shows and great digital content we can say, "Here's a brand, start there." They will immediately go to what they're good at, which is storytelling, but that doesn't necessarily mean storytelling on behalf of a brand. So what we try to do is create a team atmosphere internally where a lot of people have a lot of different backgrounds, but working for brands. One guy, John Kaplan, co-produced a full-length film for Pepsi, First Descent, so he brought the expertise of brands from that world. There's another guy who's one of the creators of the Carmen Electra DVD workout series. He always brings that [mindset] to the table about content that goes straight to DVD, and that may be interesting for a brand. Jesse Coulter contributed to the Marc Ecko viral piece on tagging Air Force One, and he also did a music video with Common for Brand Jordan. As much as I love his commercial reel, I love the other things he was able to do while sitting in an ad agency. The same is true of everyone here; they've all done something different that everyone on the team can learn from.

BOARDS: As a last question: what do you think about Cadbury "Gorilla" winning a Cannes Grand Prix, and the idea of entertainment over product in work for brands?

Al: I think "Gorilla" was a triumph for simplicity, wit, uncommon sense, chocolate and for Fallon.

Jae: At CAA our whole premise is that the more entertaining your marketing can be, in all media, the easier it is to draw an audience. Look at The Dark Knight. Despite a strike and a de facto strike, entertainment is alive and well; if you can spark their imagination they'll come. That's true of "Gorilla". When you hold it up against the HBOVoyeur project and the painstaking creative that went into Halo 3 "Diorama", it's easy to say, "Wow, how can 'Gorilla' be in the same league?" But it is, because you watched it on YouTube 17 times, because it's wildly entertaining.

Greg: There's a million reasons why they shouldn't have done that spot. Then I watch it and I laugh and I like the brand. If I saw that candy on the shelf next to another candy I'd buy it because I liked the people who brought it to me.

Rob: But I think that's the point. I think if that was for Nike it wouldn't have been as good. Cadbury is a fairly staid brand, so it was just for reassessment. We're looking at some things for Microsoft to get people to reassess. BK was a complete reassessment. Some of these brands have a reputation or are in a space that they really struggle to

get out of and I think Cadbury was one of them. I just think it's one in a million. How many have tried to do something like this? I have. You just have to take it for what it is. Once in a while something will hit... I don't think I could sell most of my clients on, "Let's just make this entertaining." If you can make it entertaining and make it say a point [about the brand], I think you're in a safer space.

BBDO, New York http://www.bbdo.com
CAA http://www.caa.com
Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Boulder http://www.cpbgroup.com
Mother, London http://www.motherlondon.com