Task
Agencies talk. An idea would be discussed, planned and researched for months before anything existed that a client could look at. By then the conversation had drifted from what anyone originally meant.
As the group’s chief creative officer put it to Campaign at the time: “The amount of chat that goes on in an agency is painful. It can take up to a year to make a TV commercial.”
The cause was structural, not cultural. Strategists were rewarded for thinking. Making happened somewhere else, later, by someone else. Collaboration across disciplines depended on personal relationships, or on asking people to do things on top of their day jobs.
Pilot
We did not run a change programme. We built a unit.
Makerspace was created with Ogilvy’s EMEA C-suite, with Gary Bonilla as strategic maker brought in to lead it. It had a name, a logo, a manual, a curriculum, a home on the first floor by the entrance, and a sign that read proudly making pilots in public.
The model was simple and priced:
- Creative directors and business teams brought their solutions to client briefs
- We built a pilot, tested it, iterated on the results
- They got a working demo and the data to support the sale
- One flat fee of £10,000. Under thirty days. Every time.
The commercial mechanic did the real work. Rather than asking for new budget, Makerspace redirected existing budget. Instead of spending £20,000 to £30,000 planning and researching an idea, take £10,000 of that and make something. Teams recouped it when the idea sold.
Five makers on staff. Creative technology, product design, development, design, content, media. Cross-disciplinary by construction, so collaboration stopped depending on who happened to know whom.
Fifteen strategists trained through it. Three for every maker, because the unit existed to change how people worked, not to absorb the work.
The training was not a course. Strategists learned by making on live client briefs, with real deadlines and real clients at the other end.
Transformation
Three things changed, in order.
Making moved to the front. Work began with a rough version instead of a plan. A pilot of a content idea, social content launched to test response, a working prototype. Something tangible in the room meant client and agency were looking at the same thing rather than two different mental images of it.
Failure got cheap. A £10,000 pilot that fails costs £10,000 and thirty days. Discovering the same thing after a full production costs an order of magnitude more, and by then nobody can afford to admit it.
And the pilots were modelled, not just made. We built ROI models alongside the prototypes: financial KPIs, engagement funnel, as-now against future state. The rule was that a simple model beats no model. That turned a demo into a business case.
Result
Fifteen strategists trained. Five makers on staff. Every pilot delivered inside thirty days on a flat fee.
Makerspace launched publicly in September 2016 and ran on live briefs for three major brands from the outset. It was built to spread across the group’s agencies rather than stay a London showpiece.
The output was the proof. Prototypes, films, bots and working demos for global personal care, financial services and restaurant clients, each made, tested and modelled inside a month, by strategists who had never worked that way before.
Then Makerspace stopped being a place.
The unit was embedded into the wider organisation as a new way of working. Not closed, not quietly defunded. Dissolved on purpose, because making early had become how the agency worked rather than somewhere the agency sent things.
The unit was the intervention. The client work was the evidence it took. Its disappearance was the result.
Why it worked
This is where the method was proved, and it is why the practice exists.
The systems problem was an agency structure that rewarded thinking and deferred making. The empathy problem was that strategists were not resisting change. They had never been given a way of working that let them make anything, and no amount of exhortation would have supplied one.
So we did not train people and hope. We built the thing that did the changing, staffed it, priced it, gave it a home by the entrance, and taught people inside it while real work was going through.
The measure of success was that it became unnecessary. An embedded unit still standing five years on has usually become another department. Makerspace ended by being absorbed into the way of working, which is the only ending that counts.
Ten years before we wrote any of this down, a sign on the first floor said proudly making pilots in public. That is the whole idea. We named it later.