MANILA, PHILIPPINES–Dentsu Inc. has proven to be one of the world’s biggest advertising agencies behind the industry’s most powerful and “out of this world” campaigns. Amidst all the creative megaminds, innovative ideas and crazy executions under its main wing is a team of 59 “researchers” integrating what they love and what they do, and letting their creativity run free. The attendees of our adobo Design Masterclass experienced this firsthand with Creative Directors Hidetoshi Kuranari & Nadya Kirillova taking the Dentsu Team B experience from Tokyo all the way to Samsung Hall, SM Aura Premiere.
Dentsu Team B is a team fuelled by their B-side (passionate hobbies, personal interests, etc.) that believes in solving the world’s problems by pushing “Creativity First”. Hidetoshi and Nadya opened the class by emphasizing that though everybody in the room came from different backgrounds and companies, each one is an integral part of the team:
“I know you’re all from different organizations but starting now until 5PM we are ONE TEAM.” #THINKDESIGNTHINK#adoboDesignWeek pic.twitter.com/CWHriNZWRq
— adobo magazine (@adobomagazine) May 9, 2019
Information + Information = Ideas.
When you combine what you know with what another person knows, it creates new solutions for situations that may not have been discovered otherwise. Thus, this introduces a wide array of possibilities for the world.
After sharing their own B-side passions (product design for Hidetoshi and education for Nadya) and the collaborations they’ve done with other categories in their team, the duo then gave the class a working lunch to find something new about their B-side, and to show they did their homework, we tracked the hashtag #adoboTeamB on Instagram.
From a wide array of varied interests came 30 posts about wine, coffee, dancing, to breastfeeding. They were then gathered into groups to use their B-side to ideate design thinking solutions for problems.
They pitched their ideas to the whole class starting with a mobile app that uses VR to educate about Philippine mythology. Another one also made ‘Transformeals’, playing around the idea of bento boxes. While another creative collective presented an idea to integrate bonsai into playgrounds, adding something green into the cities.
One idea came out of passion about conservation, particularly about coral reefs. A full blown campaign with typography, and mobile app, they plan to bring the corals into the city to make people care about coral reefs and its importance in the ecosystem. And the best thing about it? Their campaign is called coralation (pun intended)
Last up was a proposal to normalize breastfeeding. This came from breastfeeding mom Iris Padua’s B-side, proposing an outdoor installation to educate everyone about the benefits of breastfeeding. Her group also pitched a festival to invite artists to depict the normalcy and remove the stigma about public breastfeeding.
For one day, the creatives had no boundaries of what their companies are or what their creative process is. The entire room was one team: adobo Team B; and the result is unlearning creativity as they knew it. With new lessons for the road, Hidetoshi gave them a food for thought and asked “Why are you here?”
