The Drum recently caught up with Fraser Bradshaw, managing director of McCann Erickson Bristol who has just introduced a new integrated system of 'open teams' within the company as he reviews the agency's operating system.

Bradshaw chose to explain the new system during a visit to the office.

“So, it’s a new decade and a new era.  A lot has changed – has everyone taken advantage of a crisis and challenged the way they worked?  Not many, I suspect,” he begins to explain. 

He continues: “The benefit of the recession for us has been to review how we operate as a management team at McCann Erickson Bristol; if you keep doing the same thing in the same way, guess what, you get.... more or less the same.  And in a recessionary market, at best, this will now equal less.

“Some agencies have had to acquire to force growth and many specialists have reversed their approach to become more integrated.  And despite everyone  talking about integration for a long while now, many have either seen it as a method to  generate more revenue (‘ I can now sell you a website or a new identity’) whilst others have simply bolted disciplines on without fully understanding the implications of what they’ve got themselves into.  The result: many clients are still not seeing the true benefit of real integrated marketing communication (IMC).”

Bradshaw adds that 'real IMC' is a creative, human and business discipline intended to eliminate divisions and deliver a brand at the right point in a customer's life which will provide value, create profit and engage all stakeholders. 

“This elimination of divisions and the need for open planning has been a major changing point for us over the last year.”

He adds that he recognises that the company must work as efficiently as possible and that clients and the sectors that McCann's Bristol operates within require accounts teams 'conversant in and actually experienced across' multi disciplines.

“So we have now created new ‘open’ teams to promote learning from within and to help clients have an ‘open’ plan.  During the last year, over a third of our agency staff went through our ‘50 Days of Digital’ training programme, to develop the digital learning of our non-digital teams.”

He concludes by saying that all of the agency's account teams went through a 'Demand Chain' programme as it no longer operates in a 'supply based economy' as it's business is about creating demand. 

“This ensures that we can ‘grow the top-line’ whilst also helping our clients to manage the bottom line.  Our ‘open’ account team structure now incorporates advertising account people, with digital project managers and direct marketers in each team structure and not in a silo-structure.  For the blurring of the ‘discipline boundaries’ happened a long time ago; it’s only the knowledge gap of employees and the resistance to change of employers that has kept this in place.”