Go Global with your Creative Services

Two mega-trends are influencing and changing the DNA of the creative services sector:

1. The world becomes more and more ONE place to live, consequently marketing communication and creativity takes an even more global turn than we have seen over the last decades. What works in Europe will work in Asia and North America etc.

2. The dramatic change of technology has changed the way creative people work and the sense of creative advertising whether we talk about the tools for creating advertising, for sharing and collaboration or distributing the messages to the markets.

The multinational media groups have realized the changes going on and started adapting to the globalization of creative services. They have resources all over the world creating, producing and managing campaigns; across all media sectors and across all geographical regions. Their global labor optimization gives them a significant competitive advantage both in terms of access to expertise and speed to market, cost effectivness. The results - Very happy clients!

I believe the time has come for independent small and mid-size creative agencies to challenge the multinationals on these advantages, just like they have been doing on creativity and niche services for a long time.
If the small and mid-sized agencies don’t adapt to the globalization of creative services and fight back against the multinationals - it will be difficult to compete on both cost of services, access to brilliant people and speed of services.

Sir Martin’ Sorell’s (Chaiman of WPP) view is simple: collectively there are more than two billion people in both India and China, by the law of averages there must be some extremely creative people there. His creative company is already outsourcing graphic design and animation work to 24 hour studios in Mumbai, and moving Indian executives around his global empire.

Both India and China are presently growing at breakneck speed - with extraordinary opportunities for offshoring creative resources. So, how do the largest and most competitive creative agencies approach these opportunities. WPP’s solution has been to go captive; to buy up local firms in low cost market with highly skilled creative people. It now owns a half of India’s advertising industry.

For creative services agencies who have neither the resources, the time, nor the knowledge to follow one of the largest and leading media services companies  like WPP, Omnicom or IPG, there enabling companies that can help. Quickstart Global is offering one these enabling models (www.quickstartglobal.com). They can help you set up creative teams of a few as 5 people - to a significantly reduced cost, very low risk and extraordinary scalable.

Creating and producing interactive and digital design is a very global business. All the work is done digitally and in shared areas on server - and by using chatting, skype and other cost effective tools for collaboration. The team members can basically be located anywhere at anytime and many large creative projects are done by virtual teams where skills and availability is the driving factors rather than location. Offshoring entire projects to locations with good availability of highly skilled people to a radically lower cost is the kind of value proposition and business model some would call a “no brainer”.

Staffing highly creative and qualified teams is a resource demanding operation and no doubt these skills will be increasingly more difficult to attract over the next years. Going global with your staffing and having a global labor strategy in this sector will give an advatage. Not only the multinational media services agencies are now able to run their business around the world - now even the small and mid-sized agencies will be able to follow.

At low risk !