Three months in…
Thomas Bruce from Cornell has kindly let us use this picture he took in Oslo in our current credentials (which we’ll be posting soon on Slideshare). It’s a great visual for one of our starting beliefs and also a great reminder (if you needed one) of how important beliefs and philosophy are to any company especially one as young as ours.
Even in 3 months of doing business we’ve found aspects of what we thought we’d do have radically changed. Today we came across an early draft of our credentials which talked about branded content. Originally, we thought this would be a large part of our offering. Today we’re finding it to be a small part of what we do simply because branded content isn’t always the thing that a customer is going to find the most useful in any given situation. Branded content’s a great way to entertain (sometimes) but we believe brands ought to do more than just titillate – and we think marketing can play a bigger role than simply getting someone to watch.
What hasn’t changed are the core beliefs we shook hands over. In fact, they’ve actually deepened and helped guide our actions as we’ve lived with them and internalised them. Having given this speech to countless clients in the past, it’s interesting to be on the other side of it. I don’t think we’d have accepted a belief given to us by anyone else (not just because two of us are planners). I know for certain that we wouldn’t have embraced a set of beliefs that weren’t originated by us and as a result they would simply have been more words.