It is believed that the first Advertising Agency was created in 1812 by George Reynell.
It was James Walter Thompson who in 1877 hired writers and artists to form the first known Creative Department in an advertising agency. He is credited as the “father of modern magazine advertising” in the US.
Modern advertising agencies usually form their copywriters and art directors into creative teams. Creative teams may be permanent partnerships or formed on a project-by-project basis. The art director and copywriter report to a creative director, usually a creative employee with several years of experience. Although copywriters have the word “write” in their job title, and art directors have the word “art”, one does not necessarily write the words and the other draw the pictures; they both generate creative ideas to represent the proposition (the advertisement or campaign’s key message).
Once they receive the creative brief from their account team, the creative team will concept ideas to take to their creative director for feedback. This can often be a back and forth iterative process, occurring several times before several ads are set to present to the client. Creative departments frequently work with outside design or production studios to develop and implement their ideas. Creative departments may employ production artists as entry-level positions, as well as for operations and maintenance. The creative process forms the most crucial part of the advertising process.
In 2005 OneSpring created the world’s first Requirements Agency. In much the same way J. Walter Thompson founded success by combining the unique disciplines of writers, artists and management under one roof. OneSpring has similarly combined the Visualization Design (right brain) and Visualization Analysis (left brain) disciplines to create a successful approach to defining software requirements.
In contrast, a Requirements Agency does for software development what an Advertising Agency does for marketing.
A Requirements Agency is a service business that specializes in helping their clients with gathering, visualizing and managing all aspects of the requirements for any software project. Projects could be mainframe, mobile, client-server, intranet, web site or anything the business needs from the IT group.
The problem with the traditional methods of requirements management is that they lack clarity and are often non-iterative. Stakeholders don’t really have a complete picture of their requirements until the end of a project lifecycle when they first see it in quality assurance testing or user acceptance testing. This is way too late and results in project delays and cost overruns.
A Requirements Agency brings true clarity to the requirements process by visualizing stakeholder needs and wants through the use of iterative JAM Sessions
