Walls and Open Doors

I did my first stint at Hunt Lascaris in the 90s. The insides of the creative department looked different to most today. Each team had an office. Even if the furniture didn't always match, or was well worn from hours of being sat or laid on - each team had a desk, a chair, some even a couch - and of course ... walls.

This was an amazing time in this agency's history. It was just reaching its goal which it set for itself when it was formed by John Hunt, Reg Lascaris and Jenny Groenewald. Be the first world-class agency out of Africa.

As creative teams, we would draw our ideas on paper, stick them on the walls and look at them. We'd come in the morning, and look at them again. Sometimes some would fall off during the night and we'd joke that the ad fairy came in and pulled down the bad ideas. Sometimes, a creative director actually did come in during the night and pull down the bad ones. Quite something to walk in first thing in the morning and see the previous days' work strewn over the floor with a solitary A4 pinned to the wall with a note: Nibbler.

But most importantly, the doors would be open. And often teams would visit each other and have long discussions about what was on the wall. Everyone hated Kevin Watkins's encyclopaedic knowledge of advertising. He'd walk in, scan through the ideas and inevitably say something like: "uh ... check D&AD 1989, page ... 144" and there was your genius idea. Done.

But it was all done in good spirit. The teams were fiercely competitive but were always working together to make all the work better. That is what those discussions were about. Small adjustments to a headline. A slightly modified visual. Always getting better. Going from finalist to gold and sometimes to Grand Prix.

That's what kept the ideas on the wall and the doors open. To have many people come in and say their piece. (You can read about what happened a few years later when I did my second stint at Hunts and I told John that the doors were often closed ...)

I was thinking about the walls a lot recently. Over the years, offices have become a luxury. As rentals skyrocket, it becomes hard to justify walls for people.

At Emakina, when we realised we were going to have to work remotely, I was perhaps the one most worried about the impact on my team. It is not easy to conceptualise remotely. It is always better in person. But we moved fast and began mastering Miro. In this tool, we found the closest thing you could have to a wall. Plus you could rapidly put references, Youtube and Vimeo videos and even make wireframes. We like it so much that when we go back to something that resembles normalcy, we will keep using Miro.

In the last few weeks, we started a project in collaboration with two other agencies - one in London and one in Paris. Miro is also been super useful here. All the creatives log in and we are all looking at the same wall, working in real-time together, from London to Paris to Brussels to Cape Town. We all can see each other's ideas developing, and there is a constant stream of inspiration bouncing around. Making every a little bit better, all the time.

It's not just a virtual wall. It's also a virtual open door.