Agency Wants its Creatives to Actually Get Creative

By Digiday • March 11, 2013 •

At times it can feel soul-sucking and disheartening to be a creative at an agency. You have to color inside the brand’s lines all of the time, placate ridiculous client requests, tweak things that you don’t want to tweak, make something that appeals to suburban moms with children in their teens, and so on and so forth. Basically, you don’t always get to be as creative as you’d like when you are an agency creative.

That’s why Minneapolis-based agency Fallon started its “#Make5” initiative to encourage its staffers to showcase their creative skills, without any rules, restrictions or client requests. How it works is that one person creates and shares something creative for five days in a row. The creations are shared via the agency’s Instagram.

“This gives creatives a chance to express themselves without rules,” said Marc Stephens, digital creative director at Fallon. “It’s important to keep creatives fresh and happy, to give them an outlet to do the things they want.”

The project was the idea of Aki Spicer, former director of digital strategy, who was just recently hired by TBWA\Chiat\Day.

“He wanted to create a new way to let people get a peak under the hood at Fallon, more than saying, ‘Hey, here are some photos of our holiday party,’” explained Stephens.

So far, Fallon staffers have showcased their creativity through cool illustrations, photographs, graphic designs, paintings and more. There aren’t any rules or parameters as far as what people can create. The only expectation, according to Andrew Voss, a design director at Fallon, is that people create the level of work that Fallon aspires to. Not only does #Make5 showcase Fallon’s creative talent to prospective clients and the rest of the world outside of the agency, but it also is a way for coworkers to discover each other’s artistic talents.

“It was really surprising to see what some of my colleagues who I work with everyday can do — things I never knew, like how well some people here can paint or illustrate.”

#Make5 will be an ongoing project at Fallon, and Voss hopes that people will take the initiative even further and get more creative with it. He envisions people using other mediums and sharing things like short movies, poems or songs.

See some examples of #Make5 creations bellow, and checkout Fallon’s Instagram for all of the works that are part of the project so far.