Creativebrief: As CEO of Critical Mass what is your primary focus?

Dianne Wilkins: More than ever, my focus is on balancing ‘the now’ with ‘the future’. Obviously, our clients depend on us to improve their bottom lines today, or this quarter, or this year—and we do—but I also have to look ahead and make sure we’re evolving the right way, investing in the right places, and ready to deliver a boost in our client’s bottom line tomorrow, or next quarter, or next year. When that balance is in place, the present and the future shape up nicely—call it a ‘constructive struggle’. I think you can draw a clear line between the outstanding success our agency has enjoyed lately and the overall balance we’ve sustained over the past several years.

Creativebrief: Please share a para on your career to date – specifically talking us through the high points.

Dianne Wilkins: It’s funny, but my high points mirror Critical Mass’s high points to a large degree. I’ve been a part of this agency for 18 of its 20 years, and I guess you could say that my start here was a high point in and of itself. I joined Critical Mass to move to Stockholm, leading Saab on a global basis. After two years, I relocated back to Calgary and was promoted to CEO in January 2006—a high point for sure (and a role I’ve had ever since).

I don’t always think in terms of ‘high points’, though. I’ve seen Critical Mass grow steadily, prove itself steadily, take on bigger challenges steadily, emerge from the pack steadily-that history gives me a sense that “the now” is always the high point, and yet I also believe the best is yet to come.

Creativebrief: What’s unique about your agency / business? Why did you join Critical Mass?

Dianne Wilkins: Our values and mission make us different, and so does our incredibly special culture. Our agency’s mantra is, “we’re a global digital experience design agency with a relentless focus on the customer”. We live up to that. We want to create award-winning, business-boosting work that genuinely makes customers’ lives simpler, easier, more rewarding, or more entertaining. We’ve also built an agency culture around openness, honesty, being real, and a passion for delivering truly excellent work. We also try really hard to attract the best people—and to us, “best” refers to talent as well as a desire to work in a place where everyone is honest, real, supportive, and committed to doing extraordinary things.

And why did I join Critical Mass? This harkens back to the last question: it was serendipitous. I was intrigued by the idea of digital, and like most people I saw that it was going to completely change the way we did everything. So I took a job with this plucky little Canadian agency that was making websites and CD-ROMs. There were only 25 people then, but even in those early days, we had something special. Our values and mission may have been inchoate to a large degree, but they were there, ready to grow if we were ready to grow them. So it’s hard for me to say exactly why I joined, but the next eighteen years gave me lots of reasons to stay.

Creativebrief: Who are the people new to you (either within your business or externally) who have particularly impressed you in the last twelve months?​​​

Dianne Wilkins: There are a lot of ways I can answer this—a lot of brilliant people I could name. But the name that springs to mind is someone who neither works at Critical Mass nor in the industry: Kerry Washington. For one thing, I’ve been watching ‘Scandal’ and have been utterly captivated by both the show and her character. But I’m even more impressed with her beyond the confines of my Netflix queue. As a speaker, she represents and embodies so many identities—women, minorities, a public figure, a person with integrity and genuine class. And I was among the cheering onlookers when she took to Instagram and responded to the photoshopping of her Adweek cover. For me, her message was pitch-perfect. She was resonant, poignant and incisive. She was both thoughtful and admonitory. And above all she was real. She helped me and others understand the ‘weariness’ she feels.

Creativebrief: What has been your agency’s best work in the last year?​​​​​

Dianne Wilkins: We’re more focused on doing truly outstanding, truly customer-centric work than we’ve ever been, and yet we’re tackling so many new things within that context. Lots of new successes make it hard to choose.

But the best? Our Diehard Fan app might be the best of a very impressive crop. Diehard is something we did for Nissan. It’s an augmented reality face-paint app that lets users swipe professionally painted designs directly onto their face (via the image captured by their smartphone’s selfie camera). It’s fun, it’s shareable, it’s scalable—it has everything. The engagement we’ve seen has been stunning, and it’s simply brilliant work in its own right.

I also need to give a nod to two other things. First—there’s the complex, often behind-the-scenes customer experience work we do for huge clients like Citi or AT&T. That kind of work doesn’t always make for a glamorous case study, but it’s central to making everyday brand experiences better for customers. Also, we’re doing more successful nonprofit and cause-marketing work than ever: an app that makes you feel what it’s like to live with landmines; a website to help free incarcerated Nepalese children and rebuild an orphanage; a 3D sound experience for Canada’s ‘Famous Five’. I’m committed to doing more of this, and it thrills me to see that the rest of the agency is passionate about it as well. 

Creativebrief: Industry wide, what work has excited you most this year?

Dianne Wilkins: What excites me this year? The same thing that excites me every year—innovations that make life better for people by blending creativity and technology. Samsung created an app called “Back Up Memory” that helps early onset Alzheimer patients recognise friends and family. The app detects the arrival of familiar faces and flashes a name, a picture, and a message—“your daughter is here”. It helps the sufferer, and it helps a family that suffers as well. To me, that is the very definition of making life better through digital design.

Creativebrief: Who or what inspires you?​​​

Dianne Wilkins: I’ve always been inspired by people who drive and handle change in a positive, dignified, inclusive way. Its commonplace to say that the world is changing faster than ever, but how we confront change is what counts, I think. Change can arouse fear and misanthropy, or it can inspire us to be better. I look at someone like Justin Trudeau and see a rare political embodiment of that idea. His diverse cabinet reflects the diversity of Canada—my home country, and a country that’s changing too. It inspires me to see him work to build a stronger, more inclusive nation in the crosswinds of change.

Creativebrief: How do you stay in-touch with the industry’s best work and culturally relevant news?

Dianne Wilkins: I’m sure I subscribe to and peruse the same kind of publications and sources as everyone else who works in the industry. They’re undoubtedly helpful. But my most indispensible sources are the 825 engaged, inspired people I’ve surrounded myself with at Critical Mass. Listening to them when they’re overflowing with excitement about a story that broke, or a technology we should be using, or an idea that’s changing the landscape—that’s probably where I learn about 90% of the stuff that ends up mattering most.

Creativebrief: What work or agency from outside the UK do you think is particularly influential?​​

Dianne Wilkins: Every piece of work, and every agency, exerts influence in some way. But the influence I’m most concerned with is our own. My goal is to grow our agency so that its influence grows, and at the same time I want that influence to be positive. In terms of work: I think the work that will influence people most in the coming years will be work that makes the lives of everyday people a little better. And that’s what we try to create at Critical Mass.

Creativebrief: What do you think are going to be the main challenges for agencies in the next two years?

Dianne Wilkins: Change will accelerate. Anyone who ignores this fact is really going to struggle. Clients will change, because they’ll be alert to things like the blistering pace of technological change. But above all, customer expectations will change. And because of that, I believe our guiding principle will be more important than ever: to build brands and businesses, you have to keep a relentless focus on the customer.

Creativebrief: How do you see the media landscape unfolding in the next five years?

Dianne Wilkins: I don’t see it unfolding so much as fundamentally transforming. The landscape is already home to an explosion of new and rapidly evolving media, and it will only become increasingly splintered by new options, more automation, and rapid, continued disruption. In short, it’s going to be much harder to be broadly engaging and relevant. There will also be so many more places to create brand experiences. New pitfalls and golden opportunities will surface everywhere you look.

Creativebrief: What’s your attitude to the ‘traditional’ pitch? Do you think there is a better/more modern way?

Dianne Wilkins: I often wonder what other people think about this—about the now vs. then of pitch life. If there’s one bit of business nostalgia I allow myself, it’s for ‘the traditional pitch’. Today, pitches are often onerous and stretched out—and sometimes excruciatingly thorough. And that’s good for clients, so fair enough. Clients are more certain about what they’re buying than how they ask for it. On the whole, I think the best “modern” pitches are the ones that are focused and collaborative. In a great pitch, what matters most is the quality of the output and the thinking, as well as the chemistry of the agency and the client team—and then, at the end, a clear decision.

Creativebrief: What’s the best pitch you’ve been involved in?

Dianne Wilkins: This is easy. Last year, we received a brief that was beautifully simple: “tell us something we’re doing wrong, and how you’d fix it”. The brand we were pitching was already so well articulated that it made sense for them to ask this kind of question—not every brand could do that. Above all, the pitch was a test of how we think, and how we execute. It inspired one of the best responses we’ve ever had, and we won. Since then, the relationship we’ve begun to build with the client has been absolutely spectacular and is only getting better. So, hats off to the client and to us—the pitch worked beautifully for everyone.

Creativebrief: In what ways do you think the industry can change for the better?​

Dianne Wilkins: I believe the industry as a whole still needs to work on transparency and trust. And I don’t mean just agencies, but clients as well. We both need to focus on being great partners to each other, and then use those partnerships to deliver meaningful experiences to our joint customer—the end user. When transparency and trust lead to better, more lasting relationships, the quality and creativity of the work that agencies and clients can do together is inevitably better. A good start, I believe, is staying focused on who we ultimately serve together, and aligning our success in that way.

Creativebrief: What’s the next big thing for Critical Mass?

Dianne Wilkins: The next big thing for us will have a lot to do with the exponential expansion of digital platforms (or platforms that are digital). As that expansion takes place, there will be a host of new opportunities to extend our experience design capabilities and relentless focus on the customer to new and connected canvases. To echo what I said before, change is coming—bigger, better and broader change, but change nevertheless. Our plan is to embrace it, to stay focused on our clients’ customers, and to double down on the special culture we’ve fostered over the past two decades.