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1. What sets the Creative Studio apart from your competitors?

The Creative Studio embeds an integrated, idea-driven marketing group within a PR firm. That's huge. It means we can leverage any channel we want to achieve our client's goals. We create content and advertising across any medium - TV, Radio, Digital, OOH, Print, Events - and can integrate that with other public relations activities like media relations, partner development, advocacy programs and they all come out stronger.

One of Ogilvy's great strengths is making the complex simple. Or, more accurately, we make complex, multi-channel, multi-discipline programs work. Period.

We have Creative Directors sitting next to Broadcast Producers who sit beside Art Directors, Copywriters who all sit alongside our complete Digital Influence team.

At the heart of every project is a strategic understanding of motivating audiences to pay attention, pick up messages and take an action. As the man said, "We sell or else."

It is not enough for us to create award-winning communications products, we have to master the delivery channel, as well. Whether it's understanding the needs of a community-based organization and providing them with the right tools to reach their constituency or planning an innovative paid media campaign, we have the planners and creatives to not just reach but engage people (we don't like to call them "target audiences" anymore as they are just as likely to be content creators and authors of messages, themselves)

2. What is your process for developing ideas for your clients?

The weird thing is, we actually do have a process. At the risk of making our jobs - being creative - sound less than absolutely glamorous, we have actually figured out how to create the conditions most likely to lead to great creative. It starts with talent management. We hire people driven by ideas. People who love trying to create value for end users, customers, people like themselves or, very often, people not quite like themselves.

We have crazy brainstorming techniques that involve radio-controlled cars and such. But the real creativity comes when we collect insights from understanding our client's business, the cultural context around it and the ins and outs of customers. A big creative idea that isn't born from research and strategy is just hubris.

We are trained collaborators. Our best work comes from working across disciplines - including dragging our clients into the mix. We are looking for that IDEA that captures the brand mission and can be expressed across all sorts of mediums.

Our creativity is now indelibly tied to channel planning. We have to understand how our customers live their lives in relation to media and experience to create an effective communication. And in the time when anyone can be "media" from a traditional media company to a mom in New Mexico, we need to understand how to earn "media" in a new way. We need to create value so people and media cares about our messages, experiences and conversations.

So, here is the short recipe that we use to get the best creative:

• Research: Consumer, Cultural and Business Context
• Insight: What do we know that we can build surprising strategy and creative upon
• Creative Collaborative Sessions: work cross-discipline to find the IDEA
• Planning: What experiences and channels can we participate in?
• Design and Build: Our creative has to sing both in the crispness of the IDEA and in the quality of its execution
• Measure: We need to know what works and what doesn't