White Crow was announced today at Advertising Week Europe by Creature chief executive and co-founder Dan Cullen-Shute, who will lead it.
The consultancy will rely on freelance specialists and just two other employees, Creature’s chief strategy officer Andrew Gibson and strategy director Lorna Burt, who will divide their time between the two organisations.
Clients are still under wraps, but "Lorna is bringing in a client as we speak and a couple of projects are ready to kick off", said Cullen-Shute.
"Like Creature was very deliberately set up to be able to offer our clients what’s right rather than what our overhead demands, White Crow is about taking a step further and sitting down and helping to work out what a problem is and not saying the answer is looking at your ads or your brand," he said.
White Crow was born out of his frustration with giving away ideas for free, out of the desire to "go on the counter-attack against the consultants", and out of the understanding that clients weren’t going to believe that Creature would offer any advice that didn’t involve marketing.
"I met with a bunch of consultants last year. I was initially very diffident … but I ended up thinking maybe we’re not as rubbish as we think we are," said Cullen-Shute.
It’s about providing smart thinking but also being more fun than consultants, he claimed. "A lot of smart people want the sort of thinking that they’ll get from McKinsey but don’t want to speak to people that work at McKinsey."
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