Brands are always bleating on about cross-platform thinking. They want their partners to work together – to get their above-the-line people talking to their below-the-line people, the direct mail specialists talking to the public relations team. It's cross-platform, it's collaboration, it's the name of the game in 2011.
Most of these efforts will fail. Why? Because everyone is talking about departments and structure, and no one is talking about remuneration, awards and promotions – the stuff that really matters.
You can't expect creatives to play nicely and share ideas when the ad agency people are on a retainer and everyone else is on a project fee. No sales promotion team in the country is going to share their best ideas when they know that if that idea goes on the telly but nowhere else, the ad agency will get all the credit – and more often than not, the cash too.
Remuneration – pay, kudos, the lot – has to be fair and equal. The same goes for internal collaboration. Why bother giving your best ideas to other teams if your career is dependent on your solo performance?
So we are less creative, less innovative, less effective than we could be. Does it matter? Of course it does. The vast majority of major awards in the last year went to South America, China and Russia. These nations don't think in silos or run things by spreadsheet.
It may seem counterintuitive, but it's for exactly these reasons that we have introduced a new Best Award – best for collaboration. We want to support and reward successful collaboration in the UK, and for me that means three things: treating all your creative suppliers equally; paying for learning as well as for doing; and, internally, building a remuneration strategy that incentivises sharing, not protectionism. Because in 2011, collaboration really is the name of the game.
