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Last week, I got the chance to hang out at the Future Mar­ket­ing Sum­mit 2007 in Lon­don. The theme was inte­gra­tion and it man­aged to attract a host of prac­ti­tion­ers from a decent vari­ety of agen­cies – large, small, dig­i­tal, tra­di­tional etc. While it was clear that most agen­cies haven’t fully cracked inte­gra­tion, there was a con­sen­sus view that we are all headed in that direc­tion – always good to hear when you work with an inte­grated agency.

I won’t go into a blow by blow report of the sum­mit, you can find one of those here.

A cou­ple of things struck me. One was about the rela­tion­ship of adver­tis­ing to design. For two dis­ci­plines that are so close on one level, on most oth­ers they often appear to come from dif­fer­ent plan­ets. I’ll post more about this soon, I want to mar­shal some thoughts first.

The other came from a com­ment that Rus­sell Davies made. The panel was dis­cussing who was good at inte­gra­tion in action (as opposed to those who sim­ply talk a good game). Crispin, Porter + Bogusky came up as the cur­rent poster child of the inte­grated agency world. Rus­sell made the point that there was no magic for­mula to their suc­cess, that they obvi­ously had a den­sity of tal­ent but that their real skill was that they got on and actu­ally made the ideas real.

This thought was bril­liantly illus­trated later by Tim Ash­ton of Anti­dote (who I felt was the clos­est of any­one at the event to get­ting the whole inte­gra­tion thing right and was the one pre­sen­ter to make me feel down­right jeal­ous). He pre­sented a case study around We are what we do and the Change the world for a fiver book. It was a great exam­ple of just get­ting on and doing it. I’m sure the charity-ish nature of the book helped in their abil­ity to beg and bor­row mate­r­ial but the atti­tude of just get­ting it done that Tim talked about was inspir­ing. If they needed a shot and couldn’t get it, they took it. Many agen­cies wouldn’t dream of doing this, they’d want it all pol­ished and per­fect. But the result Anti­dote achieved was cer­tainly good enough.

This move against overly pol­ished work, towards work that’s always work in progress is a mas­sively lib­er­at­ing thought. Yes, it’s still got to look good and has to have a great idea behind it but not be so ‘con­structed’ that it feels like spin. Jay Chiat is often quoted as say­ing “good enough isn’t good enough” but today, maybe it is. If the think­ing is right, if we make the right con­nec­tions with the audi­ence, if we’re authen­tic, then we can begin to loosen the grip of the cookie cut­ter brand manual.

I can only see this as a good thing.

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