Locating the value and opportunities for online collaborative creativity within advertising

Advertising art directors and copywriters have worked in teams, concurrent with workshop pedagogy becoming orthodox in the UK art school. Advertising creatives now often work in larger teams using social media. The e-studio and Online Collaborative Creativity (OCC) appear as descendents of workshop pedagogy, with claims that these practices increase innovation and motivation. This article explores such assertions in an investigation that takes place within a creative advertising degree course, where teams work online while competing on a live brief. What could be the value and opportunities of introducing OCC to a traditional studio? To what extent should OCC be implemented in the curriculum? This article tackles these questions and shares findings of a contextualist and quasi-experimental approach to an analysis of OCC. In doing so, it argues for studio pedagogy to be re-aligned with a different collaborative model as a means to prepare graduates for industry.