by Lisa Nichols and Gary Fawcett, TBWA\Manchester

Lockdown has been a time of steep learning curves, for everyone. (Who knew about TEAMS before this?)

It’s meant that we’ve ALL had to get more creative about nearly everything in our working lives. And we think that is no bad thing.

More creative with how we work from home, especially if there are school age kids going feral. More creative in how we think as agency teams, vital as lots of people are now on furlough. How we solve problems for our clients, how we service our clients, how we talk to consumers, the media we use … everything has needed us to think more creatively.

We’ve been blown away by how everyone in our agency and everywhere really has risen to the challenge.

There is much great stuff that we should keep doing.

BUT there are most definitely a few things that, in our creative opinion, can go into (Living) Room 101.

VIDEO CONFERENCE CALLS

Pretending that TEAMS/ ZOOM/Google hangouts/ whatever is a like for like replacement for chewing the creative fat in real life. It’s not. It’s like fat free anything, a good idea but ultimately leaves a bad taste and you craving the real thing harder than ever. (But that might just be me – Lisa)

EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS PINGING WHILE ON VIDEO CALLS. 

It’s the work of Satan. Turn it OFF!!!

THE TEN MILE TWO- HOUR COMMUTE

No one misses this. Staring at the back of endless SUVs (whilst also driving one) and sucking in the exhaust fumes of buses that have seen better days, that can all get in Room 101.

UGC – in ALL ADS

We’ve done this too. But let’s all agree now to never DO IT AGAIN.

Thanks.

WASTING PAPER 

We’ve done everything straight from our devices and straight to email or in presentation decks. Maybe it’s time to ditch the presentation boards and bits of A4 and think of the trees man.

MISSING WORKS DRINKS 

God we would KILL for one of these right now.

SMUG PERSONAL IMPROVEMENT

What?! You’ve not mastered Japanese whilst baking your own sourdough from scratch and home schooling two kids under ten who have gone feral?!!

NO I learnt to log onto the server remotely and mastered how to put a new background on my TEAMS call.

‘UNPRECEDENTED’.

It’s been used an unprec … more times than ever before.

STRETCHY PANTS

No on second thoughts let’s not put these into Room101 just yet …

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