Cool Colleagues: My Friends in Columbus

A creative approach to work

Dublin ad agency's outside-the-box policies aimed at inspiring workers

Friday, May 2, 2008 3:23 AM

By AMY SAUNDERS

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

At Dublin advertising agency b&a, employees are allowed to drink on the job, Hula-Hoop in the conference room and return from vacation whenever they feel like it.

As a result, they come to the office, behave responsibly and do their work. Really.

"Why wouldn't they?" asks principal and founder Jack Buchanan. "They have a job to do."

Day 5: What I Learned at an Ad Agency

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- I spent one week in an advertising agency.

I watched. I listened. I interviewed people from different job areas. I talked to creatives. I talked to brand strategists. I talked to account executives.

They were all great. I have a lot to tell students.

"When people ask about this experience, what are you going to tell them?" asked agency head Jack Buchanan.

That is a difficult question.

Mostly, I am going to tell them that it so very important to be happy where you work.

Jobs are jobs. We all get that. We go because we get paid. Although some days are exceptions, even great jobs are not our hobbies. If we were not getting paid, we would be somewhere else.

Given that, work should still be a happy, fun place most of the time. Within the advertising world, most people are familiar with the stereotype of people working in the creative department. This is where you find lava lamps, beads hanging on doorways, and lots of interesting sounding books on anything but advertising.

We expect that of the creative types. They're different. They need to free their brains.

This is true at Buchanan&associates, but it is true for everyone who works there. One whole part of the agency is devoted to loosening up the thoughts.

My favorite is the beanbag toss, known as "cornhole" in Ohio. Above you can seen brand strategist and former communication and cognition lab member Tim Laubacher throw toward the opposite goal.

There are jigsaw puzzles. Hundreds of interesting books. More stuff than I even had time to look at.

And there is no time clock. There is no one jotting down when you come and go. Although there are no hallways to walk, there is still no one walking them to take attendance.

So if you need to walk down by the river to get an idea, so be it. Even if you're an account executive and not a copywriter.

As my department chair, Dr. Don Jugenheimer, often says, every job in advertising is creative.

If you river walk too much, you won't get your work done, and I assume that there would be problems. There was no evidence of that. With freedom comes responsibility, it seems.

There will be more insights that filter out from this experience over coming days and weeks. But this seems most important: leadership and motivation and crucial.

You can assemble great people, but you also need to foster an environment that makes them feel like great people. If you can do that, you will rarely be disappointed by the outcome.



I wish that every story had a poignant end. I suppose that this one did, too. But there was a detour along the way.

I woke up Sunday morning in a hotel in Springfield, Mo. A quick flip of the Weather Channel brought up a picture similar to this one, courtesy of NewsOK.com.

Tropical Storm Erin was sitting over Oklahoma, exactly where I had to drive to get home. Winds were in excess of 80 mph, and Oklahoma City was looking at a day-long tornado watch.

Not exactly my idea of fun driving. So it took a 120-mile detour up through Kansas to avoid the beast. Thirteen and a half hours after leaving Springfield -- and more than two hours behind schedule -- we finally arrived home.

Much like there is no crying in baseball, there should be no hurricanes in Oklahoma unless the University of Miami is visiting!

Day 4: How to Build an Agency

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- I spent much of the day Thursday talking with members of the creative staff at Buchanan&associates. This directly relates to the mission of my trip since I teach copy writing and creative strategy at Texas Tech.

We did talk a lot about creativity. I wanted to know what they thought that students should have.

Their responses surprised and impressed me.

More than skills, more than software, they talked about fit. They wanted the personality to fit.

If the new person can get along, the employees here largely felt that creative skills could be improved. It was more important to be a good person than to have a great portfolio.

Being creative was more about a walk along the river than some natural ability.

Oh, and get an internship. Several people who work here started as interns.

I finished the day with a couple of books. One was Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko. It has an interesting quotation:

The CEO of a major publishing house was concerned about the lack of creativity among his editorial and marketing staffs. He hired a group of high-priced psychologists to find out what differentiated the creative employees from the others.

After studying the staff for one year, the psychologists discovered only one difference between the two groups: The creative people believed they were creative and the less creative people believed they were not (p. 7).

It's an interesting idea. It ignores the possibility of a third variable: I believe that I'm creative because I am.

The focus on people here is impressive. If you work in advertising, you should want to work here. Really. If you run an advertising agency, you should want it to run the way that things run here.

The focus is on the people. This elicits a much greater attachment among the employees.

In many ways, this place reminds me of the family agency where I grew up. My dad always tried to do the right thing for the people who worked there. He tried to do the right thing for the clients.

He was an ethical advertiser, believe it or not. It seems to me that this place is full of ethical advertisers. They like what they do, or they seem to.

At the end of the day, these are the kinds of people with whom I'd like to hang out. And that seems like a pretty smart way to run a company.

Day 3: Taking Time to Think

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Few people would argue against stepping out of your daily grind from time-to-time.

Yet fewer people actually do so.

Gaining a new perspective motivated my trip to spend a week at Buchanan&associates, an advertising agency in a Columbus suburb.

By midweek the trip already paid for itself. My mind percolates with new thoughts, and my enthusiasm for my job skyrockets.

That said, the benefit of this trip increased exponentially at lunch Wednesday.

Several of us sat around a table at the Burgundy Room contrasting academic and industry research and contemplating future connections between the two. We talked about differences between the time pressures facing academic and those facing professionals.

And then agency head Jack Buchanan said that the benefit of academia is having time to think.

As simple as it sounds, it stopped me in my tracks. I'm not taking enough time to think.

My name will be on five journal publications and another edited book chapter during calendar year 2007. For a communication scholar, this is a great year. I'm proud of this year.

But what was the price? If you're always sitting at the computer pounding out a manuscript, you are thinking. But you're not thinking about the big picture. You're being a practical scholar but not really living up to potential.

During my master's program at Kansas State, Tom Grimes talked about the business of ideas.

And ideas drive me.

And somewhere along the way, I lost sight of that just a little bit.

I still spend a lot of time thinking, don't get me wrong. But my thinking has edged ever-so-slightly toward the model of Henry Ford.

Being a research professor is, hopefully, about thinking entirely new thoughts. That's harder to do when you're too closely focused on the next publication to go out the door. You know, something about the forest and trees.

So I am indebted to Mr. Buchanan for unintentionally reminding me that I was taking the best part of my job for granted.

I've got to run now. It's time to think.

Day 2: My 5 Strengths

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- During my time on location here at Buchanan&associates, the Gallup organization's strength finder program came up.

Texas Tech has invested in this program, called Strengths Quest in this version, and I have been meaning to fill this out for some time.

This morning I took the time to log on and acquire the license number. According to my answers, my five strengths are:

1. Ideation
2. Strategic
3. Learner
4. Command
5. Self-assurance

Very interesting.

On the Job Day 1: First Impressions

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Today was my first day at Buchanan&associates, a Columbus, Ohio, advertising agency. I am spending the week in residence thanks to Texas Tech University's College of Mass Communications Partners in Scholars program.

The program sends academics back into industry so that they can bring more real world to the classroom.

Although I am exhausted from the trip and the switch to eastern time, it was a very energizing day.

It is refreshing to have a new perspective on some of my ideas. I really enjoyed presenting some of our work, and I designed two new studies on the side today (remembering them until I get home is another matter).

In a plug for my hosts, the agency seems to be a great place to work, and their intense focus on strategy is inspiring. The entire organization seems to have bought into many of the things that we try to teach undergraduates.

It's also pretty awesome to have an engaged audience. Unlike the disinterested classroom, everyone at my talk seemed genuinely interested in how the ideas could help them do their jobs.
If our students were as interested in what we teach, the classroom would be a lot more enjoyable.