The best creative idea might not come from your agency’s small creative team.

Having spent a number of years inside the traditional agency model I experienced an all too familiar scenario – client briefs agency, agency writes brief, available creative resource is engaged. Occasionally we’d strike gold, but more often than not we’d continue round after round mining for an idea based on a genuine creative or connective insight. You could blame a number of things for the constant churn – the client, the strategy, the product…but I’m inclined to point at one fundamental flaw.

Have you ever reviewed work that demonstrated an entire lack of knowledge of the audience, product benefit or cultural context? Or perhaps you’ve put in the effort yourself to really understand the consumer barrier only to see a creative response that addresses a problem that simply doesn’t exist?

You are not alone. It’s likely you’ve fallen victim to an outdated creative process that assigns talent to your brief simply because they happened to be available or ‘not working on something else’. The system is broken. Your brief is being addressed by talent based on availability not capability.

And what if that talent pool stretched across all corners of the planet, from diverse communities and audiences, with specialized and wide ranging experiences and capabilities.

Genero’s approach to creative and production enables this new way of working and we’re seeing tremendous results for our clients seeking more informed responses to their briefs.

If we look to other industries transformed by technology we see resource allocations that far outstrip any of our wildest expectations – simply look at Airbnb,  a platform that has successfully aggregated a truly global inventory (supply) and placed it at the customer’s fingertips (demand). The mere fact this business not only survived, but thrived through this horrible pandemic is testament not only to the brand, but the operating model on which they’ve built their proposition.

COVID-19 is also driving long-term change across the marketing and advertising industry, including a shift towards freelancing and independent work outside traditional agencies. Pre-pandemic there was already a trend towards freelancing and the gig economy. Research from McKinsey shows 20 to 30% of the working age population across Europe and the US engage in some form of independent work – 45% of those for their primary source of income. And Upwork’s report Freelancing and the economy in 2019 revealed that a whopping 35% of US workers freelanced in 2019 with 50% of freelancers seeing it as a long-term career choice

At Genero we recently surveyed over 400 creatives (creative directors, producers, directors, production companies etc.) from 61 countries to understand the impact of Covid across the industry on income, costs and ways of working. We learned that:

The optimist in me believes for every question, there’s an answer (somewhere out there), but the realist in me continues to observe old ways of working across so many industries, constantly disabling the connection between the two. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Boasting one of the largest networks of professional creatives on the planet, and a custom built platform to efficiently manage creative production, Genero has the right mind to solve a given problem. Post a brief, set your budget and receive creative ideas from one of the most trusted creative networks in the industry.

When category-leading tech company Plume engaged Genero for its campaign to promote their motion detection solution, Genero opened up the brief to its global talent pool. Despite Plume being located in Silicon Valley, it was the thinking of creative shop Rascal, based in London, who had just the right tonic to tell the tale. The resulting work is a wonderful piece of storytelling enabled by Genero’s ability to partner brands with creators from all around the world, removing boundaries and enabling collaboration between two parties who simply otherwise would never have met.

When Levi’s approached Genero with a ‘Stranger Things’ partnership to develop content for its in-store screens, we knew we had the right capability and passionate creative fans in our community for the job. Cue LA Based creator Imagos Films with an authentic piece of storytelling informed by their passion and knowledge of both the Levi’s and Stranger Things brands.

We all know a good idea can come from anywhere, but ‘anywhere’ wasn’t always accessible. Well, now it is.