Importance of inter-department interaction in advertising agencies and its impact on creative outputs: case study on Asiatic MCL, Dhaka

This master’s thesis explores the factors that play crucial roles in advertising agency’s workflow and creative processes. It conducts an empirical qualitative case study on Asiatic MCL, Dhaka. Review of the literature suggests that, the area of internal communications and interactions inorganisations is not a novelty research. There had been a significant number of researches conducted on importance of organisational communications, but the numbers of studies specific to media firms or advertising agencies are limited. Most of the communication based researches are focused on manufacturing firms or corporations and on the other hand most of the media organisation researches are too focused on the creativity aspect. In other words, the importance of managing communication and interaction processes in media organisations is still relatively unexplored. And research is even narrower in the specific industry of advertising and in the context of Bangladesh. This thesis expects to bring attention to this issue and wants to explore the roles of communication processes in advertising agency's creative processes and outputs. The case study illustrates the following issues: the communication and interaction processes among major departments, the influence of organisational structure in shaping communication channels, the influence of organisational culture on the internal communication style and the impact of interdepartmental communication on final outputs. Some key issues were raised by the study, such as perceived gaps between management and employees, lack of motivation within employees and flawed policies. A number of barriers to communication effectiveness were also identified, including high workload, timing of communication, lack of coordination of communication, lack of technology based management mechanisms, and employee cynicism. It also reveals some positive consequences of a change action undertaken by the management