Tom Quay @tomatbase

Agencies should act like a start-up. One of the many great lines of advice from Bournemouth's Silicon Beach 2-day digital conference this week.

That one was uttered by Tim Malbon from Made By Many, who spoke so much sense I almost kissed him smack bang on his moustache. If there ever was a model for the modern digital company that makes things for the internet, it's these guys.

There was inspiration a-plenty from other fine creative technologists too, including an openly vodka-drinking Steve Pearce (Design Director at Skype) through to a happily-disruptive Nicole Yerson from Olgivy Digital Labs. Rightly there's been a lot of love for the event on Twitter #mdpresents over the last few days. Derserved congrats to @mattdesmier who put the whole thing together (including, I'm told, the fine weather). 

In the stand-out presentation of the first day, Tim Malbon made a compelling case for sidestepping what he called 'Landfill Marketing', in favour of sustainable projects that add meaningful layers to products and services (in the tech startup style). He gave recent examples of brands that we're running very traditional (and by definition safe) campaigns with little invention and encouraged anyone with a soul to run a mile in the opposite direction rather than work on them. 

If Tim's talk taught me anything it's that it's ok to iterate too (as long as you do it quickly and definitely more than once). And that we should never stop. This is how it is now. Start-ups dotted along the Silicon Roundabout (and beyond) all do, so agencies must as well. Rapid prototyping, feedback loops, social learning and the rest.

Made By Many's use of agile extends to their job titles, in as much as they're trialling not having them. As a small company (and MxM are approx only 30, compared to the likes of Ogilvy who have a fair few more) you wear a lot of hats. Somebody raised the lack of job titles as a potential issue for clients in understanding who does (and more importantly, who is responsible for) what. In a very agile response Tim smiled and replied, 'we might change our minds'.

And I love that. We work in an industry where no-one knows all the answers. It's a rollercoaster discovery trip, which makes it great fun and incredibly tricky to navigate at the same time (something David Worthington acknowledged in his opening remarks). But that is the challenge. We should all be called Problem Solvers instead. One way or another that's what we're all doing. 

But the discovery part is what makes clients most nervous. I think what the conference underlined the most, for me at least, is the importance of trust in our agency-client relationships. In this industry more than any other we're applying new technologies all the time and for them to be effective there have to be lots of small leaps of faith. I know from my own experience at Base, that we work hard to build the trust to enable those journeys to happen and to make the leaps as risk free as possible. I guess my advice to anyone on the client side would be look to start something long term with an agency, by starting small and building. That way something genuinely new and interesting becomes a real possibility.

In the end Kat and I weren't able to attend the second day. We're a small (7-strong) team so it can be tricky for 2 client-sides to take time out together, and typically it's at a time when the studio schedule is fit to burst. So, sorry to Matt who was left holding the fort and thanks to the witty @momotempo, for tweeting most of the event in amusing detail (and subsequent daily events, I've discovered). I could have done with him making similar notes for me back at school.

Props to everyone who did their thing on the stage on Wednesday (and no doubt Thursday too) @nicoleyershon (Olgilvy), @somnesi (Microsoft), @matlock (Storythings), @malbonster (Made By Many), @stevebuzzpearce (Skype) and @GregHadfield (@CoggApp)

Mash Creative were commissioned by ICON magazine to ‘Rethink’ the Royal Mail identity as part of the magazines ongoing feature. --- To move forwards, sometimes you need to look to the past. Brand identities seem to have a habit of becoming too complicated over the years. We wanted to take the Royal Mail logo back to basics while retaining key elements of the original, thereby creating a design that would remain fresh for years to come.