Agency Visit - Team One

Earlier this semester, on All Hallow's Eve, we had the pleasure of learning from some industry professionals over at Team One. A visit full of festive costumes and furry friends, definitely an agency to remember. Beyond the beautiful industrial working space, as seen in these pictures (taken from Google):

Team One left a lasting impression on me. If I had to describe this visit in three words it would be: Smart, Significant, and Sincere. The advice my team received at Team One, was some of the most actionably helpful information we'd received throughout the duration of our class. The lecture given by Chris Graves, Team One's Chief Creative Officer, was incredibly resonant and gave real life examples of how to garner emotion through advertising. And the following round-robin session with Team One employees gave us real plans and ideas to execute for our experiential marketing.

My first insight was discovered during Chris's lecture: rational thinking leads an audience to make conclusions, while emotional thinking leads to action.

This has been a theme throughout our visits, but was really driven home during the gun violence awareness examples. There's so much content out there today, that if you really want to be differentiating you have to make your audience care. How do you make them care? Show them how your issue is directly impacting them, don't tell them. Make it hurt, make them feel and make an impact.

During the same lecture I had my second takeaway of the evening: Good strategy will seem like magic. Chris said it's our job as advertisers to turn intelligence into magic, which is a beautifully way to describe an ongoing theme in the marketing industry. For every campaign, weeks of research are put into finding the best insight and crafting your strategy. However one of the fatal flaws young marketers make, is spelling out your strategy in your creative. Explaining yourself in your creative ruins the magic of having a perfectly tailored advertisement appear, and resonate so perfectly with the audience. Don't ruin the magic, keep your strategy hidden and integrated in your creative.

My last insight of the evening actually came from our round-robin session with Team One employees. My group had hit a little bit of a creative wall, we knew we wanted to make awesome experiential experiences for our brand, but couldn't really think much beyond tabeling. After talking to a few of the professionals at Team One, it became clear that events can always be elevated. One Team One employee in particular, Alla Arutcheva helped us think of the idea to give out coffee at our tabling event. Even though our group is talking about sleep, the idea was that "You wouldn't need a morning latte everyday if you got better sleep". Alla also helped beyond ideation, she gave us the confidence boost that we really needed. Our product was often received with a lot of skepticism about students actually wanting to use it. And understandably so! It's a big ask to try and get people to truly change their habits. But Team One was one of the only agencies where I felt like people really believed in us. Alla was so excited about our product, that she even bought one of our prototypes right off of us at the visit.

I'm incredibly grateful for our visit for Team One, for all of their practical help, and the morale support they were able to provide our team.