We Respectfully Disagree.

A battle of the advertising industry since the beginning of time, overpraising and under-delivering still goes on today.

After all, most agencies are competing for business- they feel a need to promise great things to seem more valuable than their competition and sometimes those promises get a little over the top.

A recent discussion in this AdAge article got us thinking, though. Someone commented that it’s unfair to show work in your portfolio done by employees who no longer work there.

We respectfully disagree, at least from a small studio standpoint.

We work as a team, and just because the design of a project may have been done by someone who has moved on doesn’t mean several of us didn’t have a hand in the finished product. There’s the art direction, proofing, fact checking, and suggestions. We consider that our own work. Very rarely does a project get completed that several of us haven’t touched in one way or another.

Similarly, we think a studio is a place that fosters creativity. It’s quite possible that no matter who did the project, the concept couldn’t have been duplicated outside the context generated within our walls.

We don’t put anything in our portfolio that we’re not extremely proud of- and part of that is being proud of the employees we hired to create it. No matter if it didn’t work out in the end- it still happened and we’re happy something good came out of it. We think that says something about the studio we are, and try to be.

It’s another reason we’re grateful for our small, natural size.