In-House insights from Evonne Mackenzie and Caroline Pay
The V&A's Head of Design and Headspace's CCO joined us for our latest panel
After each of our In-House Life panel sessions here at IHALC, we bring together some key insights from our speakers in an insight post here on LinkedIn. Our latest session featured Headspace CCO Caroline Pay (above right) and V&A Head of Design Evonne Mackenzie.
On being data-led: Caroline talked about the differences between her agency life as a creative director and her role at Headspace. “In advertising, as a creative director people employ you for your ability to make decisions, in a tech start-up it’s all about your members. My experience, taste, gut and opinion is only 50% of the story.” A/B testing, audience research and data help inform the other 50% when it comes to creative. The key, she said, is to make sure that if different versions of something are tested, creatively she is happy with all of them, so that nothing goes out that she isn’t proud of.
The cultural shift from studio to in-house: Evonne talked about the huge cultural shift in going from her previous role at Heatherwick Studio to the V&A: “I’ve come from somewhere where risk and change and the unknown is the goal - if you know what it looks like you’re not working hard enough and everyone has total comfort with that. Here, everyone is primarily used to dealing with existing things and their job is to preserve and to conserve.”
Coping with the sheer volume of assets being created: “Before I came, anyone could ask for anything, anytime,” Caroline explained. 99% of assets were created bespoke. She has introduced a tiering system: tier one work uses a template, tier two work reuses existing assets and tier three is bespoke. In this way, only 30% of work is now created bespoke, saving time and resource.
On building awareness and trust in the in-house team: “I spent the whole first year going round and learning what the job should be, essentially,” said Evonne. “There was a lot of advocacy, explaining what my vision for the department was: I presented what I thought our design principles should be to the whole organisation and that brought people out of the woodwork and towards me… And of course it works by reputation – you do good work for someone and they tell their colleagues and your reputation builds.”
Approvals: Caroline referred to the difference from agency life, where she would be expected to approve every piece of work, to in-house where the sheer volume of assets being created makes that impossible. Instead, she has instigated a retrospective system of monthly ‘calibrations’ where “everything that has gone out drops into a deck and we talk through it all, look at all the results and all the assets”.
And client approvals: “We are trying a system where we say ‘these are the things we are evaluating here’, and spell them out in bullet points. We’ll say ‘I want your comments in this context but ‘I do not like’ is not allowed in this room’. It’s not perfect but we’re trying to get people to be able to articulate their opinion in a useful way,” Evonne said.
And on adding strategy to execution: “There was a bit of a gap strategically and conceptually,” Caroline said. “Someone would want a ‘thing’ and we go to straight to designing it without ensuring it ladders up to one of our priorities. I’ve tried to install a strategic approach with more discipline about what are we doing and why. Being on the leadership team is really helpful because I’m there at the beginning of the strategic conversations, so the brand team is part of decision-making and we can build briefs together. There is no them and us when it comes to briefing, it’s about let’s make the most of this opportunity together.”