It’s been one and a half year since homecoming from the UK after graduation. The flight to Taipei was in the end of January 2020 right before the outbreaks of COVID-19. I’ve never travelled abroad ever since. After three-month break, I returned to work as a role of Associate Art Director in an advertising agency, which is a completed milestone of my career plan made before going abroad. "Is it necessary to have a master degree working in advertising?" A predecessor who have left advertising industry once asked me. For me, a master degree is just a trophy of achieving my goal; I chose advertising-relevant programme as a ticket to what I want to pursue in my career while going abroad was to broaden my horizon and see the different world.
Dentsu One Taipei that I am currently working for is a creative company belonging to Dentsu International, which is the one of the parts of Dentsu Group while another is Dentsu Japan Network. I got a notice from my supervisor of the Young Innovator Workshop held by Dentsu Group - the employees under 30 who possess English ability to work and present are called to self-recommend to join. I was lucky selected to be the one of the 16 candidates, of whom 8 from International and the others Japan. The two groups of people will be randomly paired to 8 teams, guided by an assigned mentor to work on a three-week project. The top three winners who are from Dentsu International will be provided an opportunity of a three-day visit to Dentsu Tokyo.
After a two-hour online meeting from opening, team announcement to briefing section, we all embarked on a transnational teamwork. My teammate is an outgoing Japanese girl who is entitled as Activation Planner at Dentsu Japan, interning in Dentsu abroad after graduation then employed by current company for almost 4 years. We excitedly introduced ourselves with a little shyness in first online meeting, scheduling following meetings and workflow, which reminded me of the icebreaker at the first workshop with my British and Korean teammates back to those university days. The brief asked us to come up with a big idea that can be executed by a digital or data-driven activation for a British brand, Heinz Beanz. In light of the low loyalty to the brand among young audience, our mission was to tackle this problem by either increasing brand awareness, preference or others.
This workshop reminded me of the student life back to the UK. However, there was neither icebreaker in person nor the ease being a student. We have to make a good time management, particularly transnationally work with each other or consulting with our mentor online using our spare time from work. Luckily, we have no difficulty to schedule meetings because there was only one hour difference between us. On the other hand, finding our mentor was not that easy. The original mentor was a Joint Chief Executive Creative Director at Dentsu McGarryBowen (Dentsu MB) in London; however, she couldn't take this job for some reason. Finally, the host successfully had a Japanese creative director also from Dentsu MB, London, accept the request and become our new mentor.
Taiwan started covid-19 level-three alert just right after the kick-off of the project. Honestly, thanks to work-from-home, I actually spent more time on this project than I thought I could. During the ideation, we had three online brainstorming meetings, proposing our ideas to the mentor twice, and finally decided on our core idea and started working on execution after several discussions. "Five Minutez Beanz" was chosen to be our creative concept. With the usage of influencer marketing as communication tool, we planed to invite several macro and micro keep opinion leaders across multiple categories to generate easy, simple, five-minute bean-based recipe films on their own ways, focusing on the management of Heinz Beanz Instagram account along with physical school events to enhance the interaction and connection with the young British.
We practiced oral presentation together for several times with full confidence of our work. Compared to the final presentation in front of programme manager and the lecturers while studying my master, what made me more nervous was that the audience were not only other 14 candidates but also a lot of C-levels at Dentsu across the world, including Merlee Jayme, the Chief Creative Officer at Dentsu International APAC. Surprisingly, I had witnessed 8 different ideas and executions developed based on a single brief; some of them provided the solutions of CSR (corporate social responsibility), some created social campaigns or digital platforms, some planned physical events along with digital activations, whilst some rebranded it or even went for mascot marketing. The perspectives, insights, styles and initiatives were all different.
It was a shame that we were not selected as top three. Generally speaking, what we delivered was a highly professional presentation with a refined and well-designed visual asset of key visuals and presentation layouts, which was like a proposal ready to provide to clients and almost the best one they had ever seen for years. However, in light of the original purpose of this workshop that was to provide a stage for young creatives to freely and boldly fly with their ideas without consideration of execution or limitations from clients, our idea was, however, too rational and lacked emotional connection with our target audience. It could be also seen that we actually compromised our creativity thinking too much on whether our idea could be executed in real-time. Still, it is worthy to mention that we received direct feedback from Merlee Jayme, who inspiringly encouraged us and gave as a lot of suggestions other than assessment. After reviewing evaluations and feedbacks on our and others' works, we reflected on the whole process and found that we actually once had brilliant ideas but eventually failed because of "thinking too much". I really realised that a good idea comes from unique and precise insights whether big or small. What on my mind driving me on this whole experience might be the low confidence in my own ideas due to the lack of relevant work experience. I would say that both of us being juniors were reluctant to decision-making, relying on the advice given by mentor too much, and became indecisive under questions. Perhaps it is the path to the top we must go through. At my first job that I recalled, I actually found my courage to confidently promote my own works to others after few years working in design industry, even became a mentor and supporter to the juniors while being a senior designer.
Although the result is not satisfying, I gain an unforgettable experience working with my Japanese teammate with whom I got along and had a great time. We put a lot of efforts and supported each other as much as we could. Moreover, thanks to this international workshop, we could meet other versatile innovators with various backgrounds from whom we could learn, and be directly mentored by excellent predecessors from different nations. I have a fresh thought of creativity and a new understanding of both my advantage and disadvantage, which guides me ahead of the road on my career.
This is a screenshot of the online interaction amongst all innovators. Cheers!
Comentarios