CHAPTER V CONCLUSIONS
Through investigating the competencies for creative director of agencies in Taiwan, this study has explored the major elements needed to be a creative director with excellence. They are creativity management, project management, people development, account management and other competencies such as passion,
leadership, interpersonal skills, learning orientation and communications skills. In this chapter, conclusions would be made in accordance with the founding in previous chapters, and the recommendations to the future studies would be included in this chapter as well.
Conclusions
Based on the research purposes and findings, the conclusions are drawn to present the answers of the study, the competencies needed by creative directors of advertising agencies. As competencies can be seen as a method to establish the fundamental work for human resources management and development, advertising agencies can use the identified competencies in this study to build up a round mechanism to locate, train, manage and develop talents to be successful creative directors.
In the Chapter IV, competencies related to creativity management, project management, people development and account management are proven to be essentially needed by creative directors of advertising agencies. Therefore, the
conclusion and recommendations would be draw basically from the founding showed at Table 4.2, Table 4.3, Table 4.4 and Table 4.5.
Competencies for creative director are related and rooted each other on
Rikard Lindgren, Dick Stenmark, Jan Ljungberg (2003) ever made a statement that competencies system for knowledge-based organization should not be merely a series of knowledge, skills, and attributes, for which is best-suited for the job-based organizations. Therefore, for knowledge-based organization like advertising agency, instead of thinking of jobs in terms of a relatively fixed position occupied by a person, it seems to be more suitable to see the person as a knowledge resource working for an organization (Lawler, 1994).
In cases of advertising agencies in Taiwan, the competencies needed for creative directors aren’t responsible for creativity management, project management, people development, and account management separately. It should put all of them together as a knowledge resource working for an agency. Given that, the competencies for creative directors of advertising agencies are to work well with the identified functions in a dynamic setting.
In the previous chapter, table 4.3, table 4.4 and table 4.5 have shown the relations between the characteristics like leadership, communications skills, interpersonal skills, learning orientation and passion, with the identified functions mentioned earlier.
Therefore, a deeper inspection would be made to draw the conclusions by looking into the specific item, which is identified as competencies for creative directors of
advertising agencies in Taiwan.
Creativity Management
Titled as creative director, these people represent creative icon in advertising agencies. All the creative directors have the background related to creativity, and that is the reason to bring them up to the position where they are now. They have been seen talents with creativity, but as a creative director, which is entitled with a
managerial role, they have to demonstrate their leadership to the team players. They must have been credited by their phenomenon pieces of work, but when stepping up to the managerial position, they have to transfer their own experiences in terms of knowledge, skills and judgment to the team they work with. Creativity management is never easy. It’s a process how creativity is generated and proved workable on specific purpose. Therefore, for a creative director, standing at a higher point to lead the team is no longer a work can be done without other’s engagement. In advertising industry, many have been seen as talents of the era but failed to take managerial work as creative director. There is nothing wrong about not being a creative director for a creative talent in the advertising agencies. According to the interviewee in case B, some people who couldn’t fit in the life of advertising agency, even though couldn’t pursue career goal there, yet they may explore their talents and garner achievement in other places. But this also points out that a person’s creativity might be highly related to the quality of the creativity generated from a team while doing creativity
management, yet it’s not necessary to get the creativity management well done simply by creativity. Creativity counts heavily and in generating ideas particular, but to successfully do creativity management that must match the organizational goal and specific purpose through leading a group. Communications, leadership, and
interpersonal skills are all involved within the process.
Project Management
Working at the advertising agencies is well known for it’s high tense of pace.
With consideration of doing best advertisement, creative director as a team leader has to present works in the given time through leading a group of people. Seeing each of advertisement or its campaign as a project-based work, creative director has to complete the task as managing the project. When it comes to manage a project,
planning and execution are involved and would break down to more specific work with concerns.
People Development
The most important asset for advertising agencies is human capital. The creativity can be capitalized because of the transformation made by creative team.
Thus, for creative directors, valuing the team members is an essential more than just developing a successor.
Account Management
Unlike project management refers to a short-term task, account management always represents a longer term of work for creative directors to maintain or improve the relationship between advertisers and themselves.
However, creative directors manage accounts and earn the creditability by their work and the way they work. In other words, advertisers would like to work with creative directors who are well getting alone with. They expect less
miscommunication, commitment and the ability to meet the deadline. It’s also approved from the interviews conducted in this study, that most of creative directors have an impression that advertisers care about the communication channel sometimes better than the quality of works.
Other Competencies
As stated before at the table 4.3, table 4.4 and table 4.5, competencies like leadership, communications skills, interpersonal skills, learning orientation and passion are definitely essential related to the rest competencies that researcher
identified in this study. This gave an idea that these elements are highly related to the
excellence of a creative director and can root each other competencies on with mutual benefit.
Developing Competencies as a Whole
The five competencies are representing how creative directors function at the advertising agencies, and they root each other on to a degree. Because creative directors prefer to give on-job training while doing creativity management, through the processes of how creativities are generated, team members learn about more than judgment. They can also learn about how to come up with strategy for advertiser, learning perspectives from different parties who are concerned. At the same time, doing project management is also an approach to allocation resources to accomplish the goals by means of leadership that is the key model to get thing done. Also, doing account management is relied on heavily about how you work in terms of creativity management and project management. Nevertheless, creative directors can’t make these things happen without people development. Therefore, it can be concluded that these competencies are not only important individually, but also can root each other competencies on to a great deal of degree.
Results Different from the Reviewed Literature
The studies in regards to creative directors themselves are relatively rare in Taiwan. Most of secondary date is collected through magazines and published article.
Compared to the literature illustrating the situation overseas, the competencies needed by Taiwan’s creative directors are relatively have smaller scope. Creative directors also take charge of strategy planning, but which is always accommodated with relatively small scale of marketing campaign reflecting a smaller market where the advertisement is about to go in. In Taiwan, strategy weights less than it does in
America, Europe, Japan and other countries where advertisement are well-developed and robustly driven by huge desire of purchase power.
In addition, compared to Spencer & Spencer’s theory (1993), the competencies we identified in this study, can be divided into two groups – tangible and intangible.
And these main four function-based competencies can be also illustrated as the skill s and behavior of doing them, and the knowledge and attitude of being them.
Recommendations
Competencies system is widely applied into recruitment, training and
development, performance appraisal and so forth for it gives a guideline for people to align with their strategy of human resource management and development. Therefore, through this study, the aspects for people concern about the competencies of creative directors. Below are recommendations made to the different parties with concerns.
For Human Resources Professionals
Once competencies for creative directors of advertising agencies are identified, HR professionals can use this guideline to establish the fundamental framework to develop HR competencies-based management system in terms of recruitment, training and development, performance evaluation appraisal and so on. Each competency can give each HR professional idea to leverage potentials’ strengthen. And the most important thing is to see the competences model as a whole, rather than merely
improve each of the competencies specifically. Even though some skills or knowledge is designed to better a specific capability, such as tips to do brain storming or the ways to coach people, yet it’s always a key issue to well develop creative director with
excellence from these aspects, ignoring any of them.
For Executives
Creativity has been always considered the elements to a good change which is needed greatly by many executives tempting to lead the organization to the peak. The core elements related to creativity have been great studied, yet no one can really tell the formula for everyone to produce quality creativity.
Through this study, creative directors for their expertise and professionalism showing how to combine right-brained thinking and left-brained thinking together are demonstrating excellent dynamics of “good creativity.” They are no more the
stereotype who can’t obey the rule. On the contrary, they are precise, especially when it comes to scheduling. That’s how they generate idea, complete projects, and satisfy clients within limited resources and given time. Unlike most of people learning to make creativity after they are well-equipped the skills and knowledge for a certain job, creative director leverage their passion, and utilize it to creativity. This is more like a self-driven process. Therefore, the executive can learn about the reasons and factors attract creative people to devoted, and why they are attractive. In light of that, people are willing to discover the possibility of themselves in both ways of creativity and execution.
For Future Studies
This study only have four interviewees to generate the founding and conclusion, even though their responds are aligned to each other, yet it would be always better to increase the sample size by having more interviewees to enhance the validity.
Beside, this study provide an exploratory study to see the possibility of
implanting human resources management into knowledge-based organization like advertising agencies, however, there will be definitely many challenges that would emerge when implementing in reality. Therefore, for future researchers who are interested to digging into this field deeper, researcher suggested to look into the real case and gather more date before handling related issues.
