Who doesn’t want to see how the other half lives? There is the website, Ain’t No Disco, that offers views on some of the more rocking, indie agencies worldwide. The picture above is of advertising agency T3 from Disco site. and then there’s an article in AdWeak that takes a more serious approach:
“Ad agencies, with their creative focus and unconventional corporate cultures, offer a fertile laboratory to explore cutting-edge change in the workplace. Office design is rife with trendy jargon, but beyond debate is the fact that the environments both epitomize and enable new ways of working. Assembly-line cubicles and closed-door offices have decreasing relevance in a workplace changed by mobile technology and new business priorities that demand greater collaboration.”
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They may have a decreasing relevance, but how many folks are still toiling away in cube purgatory? Digitas? Yes. McCann Erickson in New York? Hell, hell, yes. However, the article focuses on a firm called Clive Wilkinson Architects (CWA). They’re like the hotshot go-to guys for agencies these days and this is a good thing. The shop designed the new VCUBrandcenter building, the Googleplex, Mother’s and JWT New York’s offices. The latter space is pretty awesome.
“It used to be that 90-95 percent of America was based in the service economy that was modeled upon an organizational pattern formed in the last industrial age and based on how people thought about factories and how people were productive in a factory-like way,” Wilkinson says. “We’ve come into a new knowledge economy, a new-idea economy that’s definitely moved away from routine drudge work. That means people spend a lot of time in meetings and in collaboration, so when they do concentrate at work they don’t need to be around people. The more mobile our tools become, like with laptops, where you can take your work home easily, the more people will be doing their concentrated work away from the office and their collaborative work in the office.”
Isn’t he perfect to work with ad agencies? Call him! It’s a long ass article, but if you’ve got the time, it’s a nice read.