IN THE PRESS
February 26, 2025
For our regular feature Agency Advice, we ask marketing bigwigs how they make space for creative exploration in the cutthroat modern world.
In the lead-up to The Drum’s World Creative Rankings 2025, now only a week away, we asked leading creatives in the ad industry how they keep their creative juices flowing (spoiler: most of them said the key is to get out of the house and touch grass every once in a while).
But, in an agency environment, personal approaches can only ever be half the story. Agencies, after all, hope to be more than the sum of their parts. Setting up a whole team of people to work creatively day-in day-out is, in some ways, the most important job of an agency. So, how do agency leaders create an environment that nourishes and supports the creativity of staff? We asked them.
Nic Climer, executive creative director, Rapp: “Creativity doesn’t die in chaos; it dies when we stop making space for it. Agencies get buried in ‘more for less,’ treating creativity like a cost instead of the growth engine it is. Want better work? Bake it into scopes. Want braver ideas? Put your money where your mouth is – tie agency pay to performance and let the best ideas prove their worth. Creativity isn’t dead, but risk tolerance is and that’s the real killer. The world doesn’t need another safe campaign; it needs work that makes heads turn and souls stir. Otherwise, we’re just feeding doom-scrolling meat puppets a steady diet of idea scraps and mushy executions.”
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