Carmichael Lynch \ Internal

The Big Grellow Brief

The biggest challenge as a big agency is making sure you are growing your young talent effectively (and quickly) so that they can hit above their weight and make the greatest impact on your team. The obstacle to making this happen is that agency environments are fast and there isn’t a lot of space to teach and allow for failure leading to a slew of management bad habits.

I was lucky enough to find a strategy partner equally passionate about growing young talent as I was, so as a side passion project, we designed an internal “big swing” brief that would teach young creatives and strategists how to work together and think big in an environment specifically designed for teaching (with room for failure). We named it after our internal agency color: grellow. Below is the result of that project.

Part 1:

CREATING THE BRIEF

We tasked a group of 3 junior planners to develop their own briefs against one simple question: How do we make National Parks more accessible?

We provided them with no other limitations accept that singular task. Over the course of several weeks, my strategy partner, Ethan Perushek, and I met with the planners to provide feedback on their one sheet brief. Each planner than submitted their briefs to a panel of judges consisting of the highest ranking personnel at Carmichael Lynch who voted on the strongest way in to the question. The 4 planners then joined forces to create a singular briefing presentation for 3 teams of junior creatives and our internship group to work against.

Part 2:

FOSTERING TEAMWORK

Once we got sign off from the board on the brief to pursue, we paired each of the junior planners with a creative team to collaborate on creative concepts to present back to the board. We recreated a pitch-like scenario to force nimble thinking and effective storytelling with the drive of a little healthy competition. As part of the process, we were lucky enough to have several other creative mentors join the ranks to provide feedback and give each group a well rounded creative perspective. We repeated this process as part of the internship group as well.

Part 3:

THE WORK

Below is a selection of the ideas from each of the teams. I think our little experiment to grow young creatives and planners was mighty successful if I do say so myself. Seems like if you give people room to fail, they’ll swing bigger than you ever expected.