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.

Recently I stumbled across a video of Barack Obama giving advice for people starting out in their careers; it got me thinking. 


It was clear to me that the advice he went on to share is relevant for a business and especially an independent creative agency like Outlook Creative. 


What he said was, “learn how to get stuff done” and that he looks for “somebody who says, ‘Let me take care of that.’” 
My experience shows me he is right.

As I approach my 15th year in this industry, I haven’t yet encountered a client who doesn’t like it when we say, “let me take care of that.”

Reflecting on my interview at what we then called The Outlook Creative Group, way before I moved into the leadership role I hold today, I recall being encouraged by the can-do attitude that existed and how everyone was focused on providing solutions. Not just a solution but multiple solutions, allowing for clients to make informed decisions.

Seemingly, this agency’s leaders before the current team established a great culture in this regard.


Which brings me to my point; sorry it took so long to get here. It is all about solutions first.



Every brief we receive has a challenge for us to overcome, a problem to solve. The journey to finding the optimal solution isn’t always linear or direct and often requires us to lean into many of our specialist capabilities to crack it. But it’s those twists and turns and bumps in the road that can be the catalyst for uncovering some of the most creative ideas.



Mr Obama also says “I’ve seen at every level people who are very good at describing problems, people who are very sophisticated in explaining why something went wrong or why something can’t get fixed.” That has never been us at Outlook Creative and never will be. We will say “let me take care of that” and find a solution.

A solutions-first mindset has served us well for 25+ years and it is here to stay.