the magic ingredient(s) for the future of the creative industries

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING IS A PERSONAL POINT OF VIEW! Feel free to tell me if you think differently about this topic - I am happy to discuss this further.

I truly believe that we will see a radical change in the creative industries in the next couple of years (especially in the german speaking advertising / visual communication market). I honestly think this change has already started as in the fact, that the old big chunky, stiff and slow model of huge agencies (advertising, online etc) will slowly die out. for the last 7 years, of being self-employed and a freelancer, one of the key elements to success and surviving was to find the right partner for the right project (mainly single individuals or small teams). and to be okay with and drive on the fact, that grand creative projects can be handled with a hand full of talented people (not really different from big agencies, where one client gets handled by 4-6 people). people who are masters within their field and at the same time have mastered the skill of collaboration. 

in fact, for the last couple of years, I saw the following appear over and over again:
1. companies of all sorts and therefore clients don't understand why they should spend a vast amount of money in advertising, media, and online companies. times are tough. they surely want the creative input of professionals and help to make their brand outstanding and their products sell like crazy, but most of them tend to have difficulties to understand why and how they are charged that much money (also due to the lack of transparency). so they start to build their in-house design teams to become more efficient, quicker and to get things done cheaper. which leaves the agencies with fewer hands on, day-to-day design and online jobs but with the overall "communication and storytelling part" of it. meaning branding, communication and ad campaigns that often come project based and no longer in a yearly bulk of money, that is then pushed into different to-dos for agencies. 

2. agencies are trying to "hold on" to their clients and try to speed up. they more and more become "ideation factories" which don't really employ masters of any field but more and more generalists that are good with a lot of things (sometimes that means the quality drops rapidly). all of them having a hard time to work with clients only on projects bases and at the same time being able to pay hundreds of employees at the same time. so they sell ideas and then execute it with more and more external creatives that consist of individuals and groups, that are very good at specific tasks (like illustration, animation, film, photography, sound, UI, UX and so on) at the same time that means, big agencies a lot of times have to take on a "creative production" or "design management" role. and it means the employed generalists have to have a broad knowledge of all fields to be able to hold it together and pull it off. which often leads to bumps in the workflows, since a lot of them don't see the point of mastering that (my personal experience).

so what is the future outlook in my humble opinion? I think agencies will go back to smaller, more effective and flexible sizes (like you can see already happening around the world) and companies will approach single creatives or well organized groups directly to help them execute specific projects. I also think that clients will and have to become more trustful of smaller groups rather than only trusting big agencies. I think good creative producers/design manager with big networks of single creatives and groups will find a key role in this. groups of different professionals that can be assembled to the perfect functioning team for very specific executionsand projects for the best creative outcome will be crucial in the future. also positioning yourself as a skilled creative or a team will become more important. finding and mastering one's true passion and be the best at what you do will be a key game changer.

since that is also they way I work on my branding projects (getting booked by companies directly and finding the right partner for the specific tasks) and on any project for salon alpin (getting booked to help execute ideas) I thought this is a good moment to start a list of amazing individuals and teams that have mastered their field and are awesome partners and great human beings. so by next week I will publish a very austria-specific list of talented people and groups I work with on a regular basis. I will add more over time since I'm sure I will forget a lot and I hope I can add more awesome people beyond country borders. If you feel like you need to be on this list, you want to work together or you want to recommend someone for the WOW CREATIVES LIST drop me a line.