Before there was Aurora, there was an idea that we could perhaps build the agency of the future. We put this question to CMO’s, Marketing Directors and industry leaders, what does the agency of the future look like? Their answers were surprisingly similar: fast, flexible, transparent, and agile. Collectively, we knew that a traditional agency model, housed in bricks and mortar, wouldn’t fill the needs and requirements of the agency of the future, so we set out to create something new.

Adaptable:

The result is Aurora’s creative collective. What makes our proposition radical is that we create a team of experts from around the globe based on your brief. It really is a seismic shift as instead of receiving a brief and trying to make it fit into our agency and team, we create a team to fit around your brief. Our collective members are freelancers with whom our team has built relationships with over 20 years of industry-leading experience. They come in many forms; some are creative technologists, immersive specialists, artists, IoT engineers and even world-class DJs. Some work out of home offices, cafes and nowadays most work out of their bedrooms. Like us, many of them have led in the industry themselves but were unsatisfied with a traditional agency’s constraints.

With lockdowns and the rise of in-house agencies, a collective model began to move from a novel idea to be the way forward. The pandemic has exposed weaknesses that plague many advertising agencies. The gap between what advertising agencies can offer and what clients require continues to increase. WARC reported in 2020 that 82% of in-house agencies have to look externally for people and skillsets the in-house team doesn’t have. As a creative collective, we are perfectly positioned to come alongside your team, plug the gaps in your team and collaborate to see your goals exceeded. Our agile structure allows us to bring in the experts you need.

Faster and more value for your money:

Need more reasons? Traditional agencies often carry colossal overhead. Up to 60 to 70% of every dollar spent goes to maintaining the bureaucracy of the agency. At Aurora, we don’t carry the same overhead or have the same bureaucracy to contend with. We’ve embraced flexible working (I’m based at our Toronto office). This means more of your money goes to what really matters, delivering solutions.

It also means that we can move faster than the beast that is an average traditional agency. As we work flexibly and keep our teams small, we also operate democratically. We don’t have the many hoops to jump through that you might find in a big agency’s bureaucracy. If an issue arises during a project, it can be dealt with swiftly. Creative ideation also doesn’t work within 9 to 5 constraints; when inspiration finds our team members, we can quickly act.

Diverse and Transparent:

We don’t just mean diversity in terms of an HR checkmark (although that’s part of it); our creative collective also brings the diversity of perspective and insight. These are essential ingredients to being successful in today’s divergent world. We bring into the team talented individuals who live worldwide, represent multiple generational cohorts, come from various ethnic backgrounds and have very different lived experiences. This is a crucial ingredient to our success.

Transparency is something that is sorely lacking in the agency world. So often, the blame is shifted, excuses are made, and clients are left feeling disappointed. A 2019 study by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) found that only 29% of marketers thought the level of trust between them and their agencies was high. A further 28% said that over the past 3 years, confidence in their partners had declined. We have been both on the agency and the client-side and recognised that this was something that needed to be addressed. So we put it at the centre of our proposition. This is why radical transparency is one of our core team values. We made a covenant with each other that we’re the first ones to fess up when we mess up.

We’re ready for something new, are you? If you’re interested in working with our creative collective, drop us a line; we’re excited to do some creative adventuring together.