Upon recommendation from BJL, I decided to get in touch with Driven. Driven are primarily an advertising agency, although they deal with aspects of design and multimedia. Their simple idea is simple: to create ideas that sell. As my critical journal was about this subject I was even more interested in what they do. The company was created by 4 people who used to work at TBWA so they are obviously very good at what they wanted to do. They did not like the way the agency world was going and decided to form their own agency.
We were able to meet the creative partner and the person he works with as a team. This was beneficial to us as we had two different perspectives and opinions on our work. We arrived to meet at half nine and sat in the waiting room and had a drink. There was a folder on the table of all the stories about Driven in articles on the web. This made for interesting reading as it talked about new accounts, rumours and transfers. It was almost like reading the back pages of a newspaper. I had never thought that rumours and gossip went on around the creative industry but i do now. There was also a number of 'The Drum' magazines which featured Driven in them. Once it was time for our meeting we walked through the agency, which was surprisingly spacious and full of staff considering they had only been set up a couple of years. The actual agency is in a great looking building in Wilmslow and overlooks the Aston Martin garage. I really like the way it is away from the town centre and in a nice upmarket place. It is still in the town centre so you can do things in your spare time but it takes away the hassle of working in Manchester. This was a deliberate thought when Driven was created.
We then sat down in an office that had just been used for a briefing and spoke a little about our course and what we have been working on. We mentioned our Final Major Projects and awards work. It was then when we looked through our portfolio. Pleasingly, they liked our branding for London F1 and Great British Blood Drive. This shows they aren't just into advertising and appreciate how ideas can work well in other ways. We were told to possibly include our final ideas and production of the 'A Thousand Words' promotion. They liked the animation and enquired about how we had done it all which is a good thing and they appreciated the diversity of our work. This is something that I found very positive in the meeting as other ad agencies have just wanted ads. In this case the ideas were key and it didn't matter how they came through. The pieces they liked the most were Berghaus and the BBC pitch win. They were impressed by us winning the YCN award and by the way we have done pricing, design and application for the BBC moving packs idea. They also praised our workrate as we had done a lot of work which is now starting to show in our ideas. This goes to show there is no substitute for hard work.
Of course it can't all be good news, some pointers we had were to put a couple of 'core' ideas in there and work around them. This can be in the form of drawn sketches or digital but doesn't have to be to a finished standard. Some people are of the opinion that we should put more sketches in our book but as we are from a Graphic Design background we tend to go to the finished piece anyway so it comes naturally to us to only put this work in. Some advice was that we could tailor certain ideas for different agencies that we go to see and to show a few less pieces as it can sometimes be time consuming. This advice was constructive and we plan to use it to make our redesigned portfolio much stronger for our Final Show.
After going through our portfolio they asked if we wanted a placement. This initially took us by surprise as we had only gone in to show our book and wasn't expecting anything like that. However, we confirmed our interest and said we would check dates to see if we could come in over Easter. We then had to leave the building due to a Fire Drill! It was good timing though as we had just finished our meeting and we returned to college. We then checked our term timetable and we will be involved in a 2 week placement starting on the 28th of March.
You can see Driven's website here: http://www.thedrivenagency.co.uk/
