I think alot of the blandness in marketing these days comes from inability of the people involved to collaborate with one another. This basically leads, at least in South Africa, to campaigns that are too focused on traditional print and tv ads and that don’t work efficiently when ATL strategies are handed to other agencies (web, pr, activations etc).

The blandness comes from a relatively small isolated pool of individuals that have been trained in a certain way coming up with campaigns that everyone else is suppose to “integrate” with…

So I was quite interested in Wieden + Kennedy’s Platform spin off which seeks to bring non-advertising creatives in to collaborate on projects with the agency.

Platform is a future creative talent platform, which will hire, teach and work with a diverse mix of people, from around the world. We will recruit talent from the arts, sciences and technology backgrounds who will work together to solve business problems through creative solutions. You will learn by doing which means being involved in everything from building prototypes, enabling and assisting in research development to curating your very own event space and programme.

I think local marketing could really benefit from a more collaborative approach that used creativity from non-traditional sources early on in campaign development. I’m pretty sure if you can put a group of people from different backgrounds in a room together and come up with solutions to problems without having an agenda to create an ad campaign or a pr campaign etc we’ll be much more likely to get some truly original work