Design can change your business: Phil Johnson of PJA advertising + marketing

I recently had the chance to chat with Phil Johnson [@philjohnson] of PJA advertising + marketing, who talked enthusiastically about the ways that the agency's new space has affected their business. Below are some insights from our conversation. A big thanks to Phil for his candid feedback, and to PJA for being so vibrant, engaged, and fun to work with! 

- Nicole Fichera

PJA Advertising is an advertising and marketing agency that combines marketing strategy and creative curiosity to find hidden truths that others are missing in order to help innovative brands challenge convention and find an unfair advantage against outsized competition. They wanted a creative environment, but [according to Phil] they did not want to make their space “look” creative by “putting a bunch of cool stuff everywhere and a pinball machine in the kitchen.”

The existing space was very complicated: several wings off a high-ceilinged main space with a mezzanine loft. These non-contiguous spaces each had their own look and feel. Groups of people occupied their part of the office with very little movement, and the workflow was fragmented.

H+A wanted to counteract this stagnation and fragmentation, drawing people throughout every part of the office. After an extensive series of programming interviews, departments are now clustered and distributed throughout the office with key proximity relationships to support the fast-paced, collaborative workflow.

The design team anchored each part of the office with a “destination” space: a conference room, a café, a lounge. Now, all parts of the office get used constantly. The openness and movement help news and ideas spread quickly, and increase the potential for chance encounters and unexpected discoveries, keeping morale high. 

The PJA project had a very tight tenant improvement budget. Every material, color, and reconfiguration had to make long-term impact at a minimum cost. Bold accent colors give the space energy, and provide a canvas for PJA’s creativity. Teams can show off their most recent work, and prospective clients can see immediately that they’ve come to an agency that can deliver high-impact work. CEO Phil Johnson says, “We went from being insecure about bringing in senior executives from outside to being proud to show them around.”

The new space has broken barriers of how PJA works with clients: they like the space so much that they want to come and work out of our office. This direct access vastly reduces communication inefficiencies. “We are more connected and able to move projects from conception to delivery much more quickly,” says Johnson.

Workflows and productivity [and thus revenues] are vastly improved for two major reasons: cross-functional activity between departments, and ease of integrating new technologies.

Advertising is an industry where technology evolves rapidly. The new space allows them to continually reconfigure for new technology as it develops. For example, the new space supports flexible video-conferencing in many different settings, allowing  PJA to move through projects faster than ever.

According to Phil Johnson, “We can get an assignment, start work, communicate quickly and effectively with our West Coast office and with our clients. It has significantly reduced the time it takes us to get work done: things that would have taken us a week now take just a couple of days. We could not have done that without the new space.”

[For more from Phil, check out his blog on Advertising Age]