Oliver Schneider
Creative DirectorCould you state your name and job title?
Name is Oliver and my job title is Creative Director.
Can you give us a brief description of what you do?
We are a full service creative agency so we get involved in any aspect of the creative process, generally for printed media but it can be online media as well – and it tends to be publishing and fashion mail order, brands and identity. It’s anything from coming up with original concepts through to translating that into the printed medium itself, then getting it printed and produced, so the manufacturing process as well. The only bit we don’t do ourselves is the printing.
What happens during a typical Monday?
Usually starts off with checking emails. The creative industry tend to get up quite late so we won’t get many calls from clients until generally after 10 – 10.30. After that I’ll be reviewing jobs in progress, we’ve got a corporate identity that we’re designing at the moment, and we’ve got a couple of magazines that we’re designing so I oversee those and make sure I’m happy with direction they’re going in. We also do a lot of high-end retouching, which is part of the creative process. There’s a lot of client meetings, generally they happen late morning. After lunch I went to see a company we’re partnering with to pitch for a new magazine. They do editorial services (we provide all the visual creativity and they provide the words and spaces). We talked about the pitch, drew up a list of things that we need to do. Then I’ll carry on working on that pitch, we’ll be coming up with ideas for the tender and probably be doing that all of tonight. That’s a fairly typical day.
Is there much pitching and sales involved in what you do?
I used to work for a big agency that produced Vogue magazine and as a result I’ve got a reputation in the industry and come recommended so people tend to come to us. But there’s still a pitch process. It’s not often that someone will say “we’ve got a job, here it is”. We generally don’t do any sales as such. People will make us aware of work that’s coming up and invite us to tender. Or people will want to partner with us.
The industry has changed dramatically over the last ten years and what’s happening a lot now is you’re getting companies partnering together to go after work, as opposed to trying to evolve into great big organisations themselves.
So for instance, the pitch that we’re going for at the moment is three separate companies that are combining to pitch for one contract.
There was a guy that would do the e-commerce and the web side, we do all of the design and photography and there’s another company that’s doing the editorial services. That’s becoming far more common now.
Could you run us through your educational background?
Because I had quite a business mind, when I went to university I set up a photography business at the time to give me income, but also it was a good opportunity to put what I was learning into practice and to generate content for the course, because a photography degree requires a huge amount of content that you have to build up.
When I finished the degree I realised that, unless you are sensationally good or sensationally lucky, you’re not going to make a huge amount of money quickly being a photographer. So that’s when I made a decision to add additional skills and services and started doing graphic design as well. Taking the pictures and doing something with them.
It must be quite satisfying to have that much control over the entire process?
Absolutely, and that’s really the cornerstone of my business, that and absolutely unrivalled customer service. When I started out, there was so much money in the industry, you had very highly skilled, capable people in each stage of the process. When a photographer finished with his stage he’d pass it on to a photographic laboratory that would then be passed on to a reprographics expert. So you had real skill and craft at each stage in the process.
Technology has meant that one person can do the work of what may have taken 7 or 8 different trades only 10-15 years ago. And that one person will very rarely be expert in every part of the process. The quality has dropped dramatically in the graphic arts industry. Everything tends to be price driven these days, so the only way you can get things done efficiently is if the whole process is managed properly. Normally a customer will go to a printer, he’ll go to a designer, he’ll go to a photographer and say “right, I want a price for this part, this part and this part” and quite often it’s disjointed, and then there’s inefficiency built in because you get duplication of effort, everyone puts on their mark up and there’s not a clear brief that’s communicated right the way through the process.
After you graduated, what was the next thing you went into?
It was a very junior position in a big agency in London. I was a scanning operator for a while, just scanning artwork and doing very basic layout work, cut and paste work, on a black and white newspaper.
I knew that the job wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to do, but if I did it really well and showed what my potential would be I’d be exposed to other parts of the industry and I could see what it was that I really enjoyed doing, and what I was good/not so good at doing. I don’t think you can know or understand that unless you’ve had some experience and that’s where work experience is invaluable. As in every job, there’s the way that you’re shown how to do it and the way you end up doing it and they’re never the same thing, it’s always about finding the balance between the two.
What is your industry like?
Technology has got such a levelling effect that there’s a lot of people that, if you’ve got just a few tens of thousands of pounds to invest in a company you can buy a lot of the technology, and do the work that previously you needed years and years of experience and literally hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of investment to set up. So as a result customers are taking a lot of that in-house. A large swathe of the organisation now is run by people who are totally budget-conscious. So the thing that sets you apart is customer service now. It’s about doing a lot of the customer’s job for them. That’s what customer service is, you actually really need to become a partner to them as opposed to relying on them to say “We want this done, how much?” you have to say to them “well what’s your end result, what are you trying to achieve?” and then tell them the best way of doing it. That’s where the experience is really useful.
What skills have you come to rely on most in your job?
Communication, absolutely. Being able to communicate effectively with a customer and draw out what’s really important to them. A lot of people don’t necessarily know what is important and you have to ask the right questions. It’s assumed that you’re going to achieve a certain level of quality, but now you have to compete on price, you have to compete on service certainly but the big thing is the pain factor. They like things to go smoothly. So if you can make that process as smooth as possible it really does make a big difference.
The other thing is experience, an overall knowledge of the industry - that has been absolutely invaluable to me. There are far fewer surprises because you can predict when things are going to go right or wrong.
Would you say there are any negative aspects that students thinking about going into this area should consider?
I am madly, passionately in love with the industry, so I wouldn’t have any negatives about the type of work itself, I wouldn’t do anything other than what I’m doing now. The stress levels can be immense, because you are dealing with people quite often, and sometimes you’re dealing with emotion, and also trying to produce things as well. Pressures of deadlines can be very stressful as well. A deadline is never when it should be, it’s always much shorter. Everybody wants everything as soon as possible.
If anybody is averse to working under pressure, I wouldn’t say get some experience and see if it’s for you. I could get a phone call literally now from a customer and they can say we’ve had a last minute change on the front cover, we need it today because it’s being printed in China tonight, and it absolutely has to be done.
Working hours – to be successful you do need to be quite flexible. I’m very fair with my staff, I don’t like to abuse their goodwill, but I do know that at times I will need them here working until 10 o’clock at night because it absolutely has to be done. If you’re going to get on in this industry you have to be flexible and realise that to get on what’s important is delivering the job to the customer and getting it right and that may mean working unsociable hours sometimes. Other than that I can’t really see any negatives at all.
What would your top tip be?
Top tips would be get lots of experience, that’s invaluable. Even coming to work for somebody for free for a week, or evenings or weekends, just so you’ve got some experience in a production place. There’s right ways and wrong ways of doing things and you won’t necessarily know the right way of doing it without the right experience. It’s not necessarily about process, it’s about attitude. It’s about knowing when something’s really important and when you should ask a question and when you should use your own initiative. That’s something you can’t necessarily be taught at university, you need on the job experience. If you are up against ten other people with the same qualification, if you’ve got real experience on the job that certainly would make your CV stand out.
If you’re going into the two sectors that we specialise in which is publishing and fashion, try to get as much knowledge of those sectors as opposed to being too broad brush. I get too many CVs from graphic designers that can do logos, and websites and this and that. If you’re a graduate, I know for a fact you’re not going to have specialist experience in all of those areas. So, if you’re looking to go into fashion, then look at copies of the top fashion magazines regularly, find out what’s going on, what the big names in the industry are, what the trends are. Try to do as much background research in the areas that you’re going to specialise in. If you’re going for a job, do research on that company, find out what it is that they do, what their mission statement is for example, that tells you what the company strives to be. So lots of thorough research - that shows that you understand that as a graduate you’re not going to be specialised but you are prepared to put the effort in to get to know that industry sector. They are very, very different. There are probably 8 different sectors in the magazine publishing industry, all of which require a totally different approach, so just saying you do magazines is quite general when you get industry-specific, and each sector will have a totally different approach and different type of customer.
