Be Creative, stay competitive

Guardian Newspapers (which includes The Observer and Guardian Unlimited) depend on advertising and sponsorship revenue, so it’s down to the media sales team to win and keep the accounts that fuel the paper. Under pressure to attract business, the team is constantly looking for new ways to service increasingly demanding clients.

The challenge for Engine was to help the team apply their expertise more creatively. Through workshops we explored their systems and processes for ideas generation, pitch preparation, presentation and their accountability and leadership structures. Having understood their team and creative dynamic, we designed ideas-generating processes and service offers that were tailored to the way they work. We then helped to restructure the department to make the best use of their creative talent, expertise, time and resources.

Making creative ways of working relevant to a media sales team.

To kick-off our plan we worked with the team on a pitch for a new account for the car manufacturer Lexus. As coaches to their ideas generation process, we helped them win the Lexus account and a significant project budget to boot. We then worked with them to develop the concept and content for the Lexus sponsored supplement “Real Time” that was distributed with The Observer as the main feature of the Lexus campaign.

A serialised publication resulting from a pitch process that we ran with the media team.

The overwhelming success of the project, from idea to result, demonstrated the value of innovating methods and optimising a creative approach. The team tell us that what they value most about our work with them is that we’ve made the creative process relevant to what they do, and given them the understanding to train others. Now they make the best use of the creative sessions they have together; developing new business pitches as well as creative campaigns.