Pop Up, the new global agency
We live in a world where great thinkers are there to light tomorrow. It’s them we were looking for. It’s them those who make us want to be the best version of ourselves, even though we share the same job description (TBD).
In this industry, they are the fine narrative creators who combine true creativity with strategic vision, empowered by curiosity, passion and hard work.
At the beginning, when I first heard about The Pop Up Agency, I had a one-second flash where I believed that popupcity.net had opened its own agency and that was incredible since I knew that the guys were evangelists for change. Well, that was a 1 second story until I clicked the link.
And man, what I’ve found there. Please meet Abraham Abbi Asefaw, Alejandro Masferrer, Julia Schierbeck, Maksimilian Kallhed, Wout Arets, and Zlatko Corluka, the people behind the London-based Pop Up Agency.
What makes them founders of the new global agency
I’ve been following The Pop Up Agency for about 1 year now, and when they started the Kickstarter documentary funding, I decided to share with you the unofficial plot: 6 creatives and strategists (from Sweden, Holland and Spain) travelled across 3 continents, worked with both agencies and clients such as Facebook New York and Coca-Cola Tokyo, driven by a single motto: shorter processes for better outcomes.
As for the documentary, Julia shared with us that today’s people just hear about the end results, but with this Kickstarter project, they want people to see behind the scenes and what it was all about.
”We think that in many cases, in our industry, things take too long to process and before it’s done, it’s already too late. You can call it unconventional advertising as we are targeting a global market, which means we are open to take on clients from all over the world and we are ready to adapt and fly wherever it makes sense for us to be.”, says Julia, this interview’s guest and one of the Pop Up Agency’s thinkers.
They’ve worked for 20 different clients in 15 different countries on 3 different continents, and this has happened in the last 15 weeks.
Group dynamic
They solve briefs in 48 hours, and this may be the greatest benefit for their clients.
“We have ditched inefficient structures and pointless processes, and have developed a way to come up with top concepts and strategies sorted for our clients, super quick. We only need 48 hours. Our agency is unconventional by keeping a flat hierarchy in our organization and therefore we try to go around the unnecessary bureaucracy.”, says Julia.
Their method is something they have spent a lot of time creating. “We have put a lot of time and energy into group dynamics processes and that gives us back so much more efficiency when we work. In the 48 hours we use different tools and methods in order to come up with creative ideas, if we get stuck in something, we always tend to change and start from another angle or change the environment or the tools.”, she adds.
And they use tons of post-its because, she says, it’s important for everyone to strive towards the exact same goal in order to have the best creative process: “The post-its are something that Hyper Island gave us as one of our favorite tools. The post-its are great to use for fast ideation and to keep track of all the ideas that come up. Each post-it becomes a product itself and we can easily compare them with each other in order to find the best solutions. At Hyper we practiced this a lot.”
Future plans
Make the documentary and expand the team, as they are now constantly moving around, developing new projects and having lectures, workshops and events.
“We had this idea a long time ago, but we did not find a way how to make it happen. Jean- Marc, who is a film maker, met us when we held a keynote presentation in Barcelona this summer, and he contacted us after and wanted to make this documentary about us happen. We knew that he was the kind of guy we needed. So, now we need a budget to produce it and we wanted to involve people in this, therefore we decided to try to make it by crowdfunding. It is our hope to inspire people to cross boundaries and to challenge the traditional industry”, says Julia.
For a proper ending, I asked her to share an advice with me in regards with the industry. And that was to always be ready and open for change and adapt to it! If you are not you’ll fade away fast in todays’ constantly moving society.
Click and support them on:
Like them on www.facebook.com/thepopupagency
Continue to read about them on http://www.wepopup.com/
Photo credit: The Pop Up Agency