Cerebra

The question of whether or not to use timesheets is one that every agency has faced, and one that needs to challenged on many levels. Teams who have never logged time shudder in fear at the prospect but it doesn’t need to a scary experience. This got me thinking of how we could adapt an essential practice into a dynamic agency that prides itself on being agile and innovative.

You’re asking people to tick off hours into a prescribed big brother model – confining them in a box and setting boundaries for their interaction with the work they’re engaged in.

Preamble:
No doubt that you’ve heard of Myspace, even if it was something like, “Hey, remember that thing before Facebook? What was it called? Oh yeah, Myspace!”

I actually still have a Myspace account. Admittedly, I haven’t logged in, in about four years, but it’s still there, with my rubbish photos and ridiculous wall posts. The nice thing about Myspace, at least in the days of yore, was that your profile was completely customisable, from background, to the fonts, the box shapes and sizes, their placement, content and other plugins. I hosted videos and games on my profile, come for the laughs, stay for the games.

I'm writing this post as most of my colleagues are too young to even know what is, and why the is a potentially important digital development. One of my first small jobs back in the 00s was to create a MySpace profile for a client, back then, Facebook and Twitter were non-existent in SA. MySpace was all we had, yes it was ugly, and the user experience was clunky, but you could upload videos, photos, text and audio files on one page.

Fast forward a couple of years and MySpace is the old shoe from several seasons back that gets lost in the back of your cupboard. Until today.

I’m not married and I don’t have kids. The closest I have ever come to being a mom is looking after my two ageing cats. Yet this information became completely irrelevant when I started working at Cerebra, and one of my clients was an FMCG product that was targeted at mothers trying to make better choices for their families. I had to make sure that the brand voice was that of a mother, speaking to other mothers.

Recently (a fellow Cerebran) and myself visited the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra as a team building exercise. While listening to the music I started thinking how Cerebra is like an orchestra.

It all starts with the composer
What do Beethoven, Mozart, Strauss and have in common? A bunch of composers and then John, Cerebra’s strategist … I promise it isn’t a riddle.