We love the art of simplicity at Outlook Creative, so I’ll precursor this with a back of a napkin version so you know what to expect: This is all about the power of listening to clients. And I mean really listening.
Because it’s only when we really, properly listen that we’re able to evaluate everything to deliver an approach that not only meets a client’s needs but goes one step further. We do this by showcasing the wealth of our connected capabilities and how, together, they can help drive a marketing and communications strategy forwards in a more unified way.
As you will have seen, we’ve undergone a bit of a brand makeover ourselves. No sooner had we started planning for it than an opportunity to pitch for Nikon landed. It was the perfect opportunity to test some of our initial thinking.
Despite the work not being fully fleshed out, the vision for our new proposition was pretty simple—articulate our wealth of capabilities and expertise via a tight narrative that’s really easy to digest.
Like every brand, it’s vital for people to ‘get it’ but we also wanted to ensure we were in a position for clients to understand what we’re all about—and not just in relation to a channel-specific brief, for example. As a creative agency that’s rooted in production reality with a myriad of in-house skills, we want our clients to understand the breadth of support we can offer.
It’s this positioning that also segues into the bigger picture of connected experiences. In the context of wooing a potential new client, it’s often a perfect storm of gentle interrogation and the asking of some revealing questions that, you never know, might yield a revealing answer. It’s that vital additional insight that enables the crafting of a proposal that’s a little more exciting and provides some real value.
And what client doesn’t like to receive an agency response that’s nailing the initial ask, but also goes beyond by highlighting other areas that could be exploited for the greater good?
Sometimes it’s also about taking some calculated risks that, based on our discovery, research and experience, feel relevant and authentic for the client—providing real value that’s specifically designed for them, not a retro-fitted, copy-and-paste job.
Back to Nikon. Upon receiving the original brief for a small event in Copenhagen, we knew there was also an opportunity to take full ownership of their exhibition programme across Europe. So, we proved efficiencies, consistency and economies of scale through a creative and strategic plan that was bedded in the parameters of sustainable production, logistics and delivery.
Our plan gave the Nikon team peace of mind that we could not only execute an exhibition booth they’d be proud of but do that at scale across the continent, while also considering the integration of communication and content solutions.
We’re a full-service creative agency and, as the context of this conversation was around events, it naturally leaned towards some of our other core capabilities. The way in which we now talk about ourselves also does this—it’s our goal to be a safe pair of hands for clients, whether we’ve worked together for a decade or we’ve just met.
We recently spent a day with all of Nikon’s key stakeholders in Amsterdam. Pete Michels, our Creative Director, and Mark Hadland, Nikon Client Lead, delivered a creative workshop that stripped things back to basics to identify Nikon’s most pressing needs and how we could help—everything from brand and specific market challenges to channel executions.
We’re proud to be working with Nikon and the exciting journey we’ve already taken together has helped build a solid foundation. The relationship is developing organically, driven by our new proposition and inquisitive nature along with our core values: commit, collaborate, create.
From a standing start following a competitive pitch, we’re now delivering all their microscopy exhibitions across Europe. We’re working closely together on all their design and digital output; we’re delivering brand and communication guidelines, along with an event toolkit that drives consistency across Europe while accommodating the nuances of their local markets and the need to deliver various campaigns at different scales.
The toolkit focuses on the implementation of a connected experience strategy and an authentic communications plan to drive richer, more meaningful experiences and refreshed creative and design that pulls everything together. We’re also making sure we can quantify the engagement at each event and can now detail customer journeys that prove the power of certain customer experiences and engagement tactics.
It’s a rewarding feeling to embark on a new client journey that is truly anchored around elevating and building their brand amongst their customers and industry peers but also their employees across the European business.
If there’s one takeaway, it’s that our new approach has recalibrated our people and our client relationships in a really positive way. We’re all fully charged and ready to embark on whatever you may want to throw at us.
This goal is a key component of our wider ambition to build an agency that partners with clients for the long-term. Clients that become friends, brands that become ours as much as yours. We want to become an extension of a client’s team—a trusted partner. We thrive on that type of long-lasting relationship and the open dialogue it creates. It takes listening, being inquisitive, and staying proactive in seeking out the next opportunity or challenge for our clients. It’s also what makes us proud to be part of Outlook Creative.
Keen on building a long-term partnership with us? Or want to expand on an existing one? Drop us a line: sales@outlook.co.uk
The great Steve Jobs once said to John Sculley of PepsiCo: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?”
Now, I’m not suggesting we always set out to change the world, but it is our mission to strike the sweet spot between just delivering on a prescribed brief and utilising all our skills across the agency to think bigger. Not out-of-scope bigger, but bigger in terms of our collaborative thinking to garner clever solutions. It’s important to stay honest to those time, budget, and quality parameters—if accurate, those are set for a reason and true creativity shines through within those constraints.
To quickly summarise the analogy of Jobs and Sculley; selling sugar water for us would be like simply executing the brief with no real problem-solving, no creative or strategic thought, no crafted experience, and no added value. You would have to ask yourself: “What was the point and what did we achieve?”
Transforming creative into reality is a bit like that. We hang our hat on this statement, so I wanted to crystallise what we mean by it at Outlook Creative.
It’s a snappy slogan for sure, but it really does distil down and reflect our approach to everything we do. It’s important to consider our audience which, as with any agency, is multifaceted—our clients, prospective clients, our people and potential new recruits, the trade media, and our partners—they all need to get it. And crucially, we want them to believe it.
In simple terms, transforming creative into reality means we know how to get shit done. But it’s not just about ‘doing’ and turning over projects—it’s about truly delivering for our clients. Finding the right solution for the challenge we’ve been set and all the while providing value, whether that be clever budget saving, additional considerations around sustainability, or just a really smart idea that goes beyond the brief to better tackle the problem.
Let’s put it into plain English—we’re a creative agency that is rooted in production reality. With over 25 years of production expertise and many in-house capabilities that any agency would be proud of, we’re able to set additional parameters in place that sit over and above the client brief. Often these are very focused on the endgame—the build, the tech, operations, logistics and delivery—taking something from the drawing board to reality, as promised.
By beginning with our endgame, it means our creative and strategic thinking is well-informed and credible, and our concepts can manifest themselves in the real world. ‘Clear blue-sky thinking’ has its place but is generally a term I dislike—it often means that we don’t really know what we want, or the implications of delivering such a ground-breaking idea. Often, you can end up selling a dream to the client that is impossible to implement on brief (not enough time or money are usually the prohibitive reasons). You end up hacking away at the original idea until it fits within those immovable prerequisites, if you’re not careful, things can soon end up looking a little like Frankenstein.
In short, we think about the audience, the end use, the unsexy ops and logistics and everything else in between, so that we can unreservedly deliver on our promise.
It’s this approach that not only transforms creative into reality but also builds a relationship that is centred around reliability and trust and is testament to several of our client relationships that span well over a decade.
