Posted by Michael Fassnacht, Chief Customer Intelligence Officer, Draftfcb

When I travel through our agency network and get to meet so many different characters in our local agencies, I ask myself what makes a great Draftfcb office. I am sure that most of us would look at the creative work that the office has produced and judge the quality and impact of all the office’s output. Others might just ask if the office makes a lot of money. While both questions are reasonable approaches, I prefer to ask myself a very different question that requires more time to answer:

Does the office as a whole combine the right elements of artists and scientists to produce great marketing? Does the office practice a productive form of “ArtScience”?

Ok, what is ArtScience? David Edwards, the founder of “Le Laboratoire”, a new artscience center in Paris, writes in his book “ArtScience” that it is the productive collaboration and elimination of borders between the two different disciplines and discourses: Art and Science. His vision is to enable organizations to “integrate some organizational mechanism that selectively reduces barriers to idea translation between the arts and science.”

The best Draftfcb network offices feel more like labs where talent from different disciplines work together in an exploratory fashion to create insightful and impactful marketing. These offices have taken our “Wheel” philosophy and translated it onto a new and their own level. These offices live in a productive tension between Art and Science and mine this tension to create truly unique marketing. It’s a lot of fun to see “ArtScience” in practice in one of our Draftfcb offices.