How to get who you want

I’m about to do something very rare (for me) here, I’m about to admit that I was wrong about something.

You see before George Bush slipped in one final fuck-up – the global collapse of capitalism – I was watching an exodus of talent from big agencies and thinking, hmmm maybe we’re about to see something interesting here. Maybe we’re going to see agencies looking again at the way that they work. Maybe this massive talent drain is going to force some introspection. Maybe, just maybe, things are about to change here.

And then of course the world’s economies turned to mush, the big agencies started laying people off left, right and center, retrenchment became one of those words that tripped easily off the tongue and the moment seemed to have passed. Sure there were hundreds of creative people all looking to start something smaller, and more collaborative and with less overhead; a thousand plans for a loose network of non-network talent. Facebook lit up. Twitter was abuzz with fresh noise. GoDaddy registered site name after site name. But I thought that the real opportunity, the opportunity to change the way that the big networks operated had slipped away, the power of the talent exodus buried beneath the noise of the recently redundant.

But I was wrong. As I’ve lounged in various coffee shops, my mac aglow, live streaming myself typing away and talking to various people as I’ve done it I’ve found something really interesting. All of the good people, the people with a real idea, the people who are looking beyond the ‘burn it down’ model and towards the ‘make it more fun, make it better’ model are talking with the big networks. It seems that I was wrong. The big networks haven’t been blinded by the squirting jugular of recession to the sights and sounds of a new, quiet revolution. Instead they’re watching, learning, networking, and cherry picking the best ideas.

Here’s what I think they’re hearing.

The smartest people don’t want to do something trivial – advertising used to be seen as something that was kind of glamorous. It was fun, it was frothy, it paid reasonably well, the girls wore short skirts and heels high enough to compensate for the baseness of their morals. You could have ideas and see them out in the world. You could change the way that people thought about things. And you could wear what you wanted while you were doing it. But that was then, back when greed was good and suspenders were red. Over time advertising lost its sheen. The money was nothing compared to the city, or silicon valley or consulting. So the smart and the greedy went elsewhere. The offices and the perks were nowhere near as glossy as the fashion industry and the media, so the shiny chose something else too. New holding companies demanded that the people in the offices conform to standard HR policies, so the deviant, the drunk and the deranged chose the music companies and then the weird world of mobile media. And of course Hollywood weighed in – advertising man became a shorthand for shallow, silly and in need of a lesson (thanks Mel Gibson) and so the serious minded looked at academia and at research. Advertising is like a 29 year old Miami party girl, no longer frothy and fun – but desperate, showing its age and smiling through it.

The smartest people do want access to the power of brands however. They realize that while spending your life trying to figure out a new way to say ‘now tastes of something’ or ‘now without cancer causing fats’ nay not be the most rewarding job nor the job with the most integrity it does give you access to something with tremendous power. It gives you access to brands.

Brands are a powerful shorthand, they touch almost everyone in the first world and they give you access to large groups of people willing to hear you out. Brands are intimately connected with people, and they have the money to broadcast a message. They can whisper and they can evangelize. Work in the confession box and in the pulpit of a mega-church, And that’s why really smart people are willing to work with agencies. They’re not going near a brand that’s all about being ‘one quarter moisturizer so it won’t dry your skin like soap’ but they are going to want to be part of a brand looking to ‘Stand against stereotypes and stand for Real Types’.

Better still they’re going to bring you new ways to express and prove your promise. The people that agree to work with you because they to believe in a brands message aren’t coming to you blank, they’re coming with a social agenda, they want to change things, they think they know how and they have a completely different approach to you and to the agency. They’re interested in playing with new media models, they’re interested in activism, they want to measure success in a different way. They’re going to stretch you, they’re going to challenge you and ultimately they need you too.

So the first thing to take out of this brave new world is this – don’t try to hire the smartest people in the world to work in and for your agency; try to hire them on projects where they can work for the brands within your agency. Agencies are frothy, brands are meaty.


It’s not about select Creative people, it’s about energetic environments – if your agency is reliant on a single department, strictly paired together as art director and copywriter then frankly, you’re fucked. Agencies have been wrestling with the idea of how to bring their different departments together earlier, how to cross pollinate more and how to take the pressure for ideas off the shoulders of the few and into the hands of the many. Most see it as a process problem and invent new ways to force people into proximity at key points in the process. Most have ‘ideas can come from anywhere’ written somewhere in the building… but very few are genuinely ‘open source’. I’ve always believed that the best ideas are both bouncy and sticky. You have an idea and you throw it to someone, they add to it and throw it again, with greater force. The best ideas gain in size and momentum as they pick up something from every hand that touched them and increase in velocity as they feed off the energy that they create. The key to making an agency work is to allow people to see just how bouncy and how sticky an idea is.

Most of the people that I know who have left the agency space haven’t immediately locked themselves into cubicles or offices. They haven’t set up strict departments. And they haven’t decided that their job is to take the brands that they’re working on into whatever media was bought by the company in the upfront.

They also miss being surrounded by amazing people from different disciplines. Creativity is an energy level.

So the second way to get people to work with you is to set up an Energetic Environment invite people in before you have a brief, ask them to help fill a blank wall with facts that might lead to a strategy, give them the opportunity to work with a bunch of people from across your company, have lots of open space, allow people to write on the walls, allow people to work on whichever brief interests them the most, with people who are also interested in it, fill the place with stimulus, make it tactile. Allow anyone to wander in at any time and throw an idea. Set aside an afternoon a week where the people you love the most from outside your agency come in and get to play with the ideas that the people from inside the agency have had. And pay those people for their time. Make it fun, make it physical, have ‘idea battles’, don’t set up the invitation list based on department and always have the session facilitated by someone who has no end goal other than keeping it fun and keeping it flowing.

Finally, it’s who you know, not who you employ… agencies have amazing black books, they know lots of great people. Bring together people from radically different backgrounds, bring together people with radically different points of view, bring together people that you know are going to just love each other; regardless of what their background is – and ask only that they give you and idea, a song, a piece of strategy, a piece of art in return.

Connections and networks are vital to the people that you’re looking to woo. You can help facilitate that. Tell me that you have a project going and that it has Jonathan Harris involved and I’m there. Tell someone that you have an innovation thing and I’m involved and they may have the same reaction. Leverage who you know, not who you employ and you’ll become magnetic

Again all basic stuff.

Invite people to work in brands
Offer energetic environments
Act as a talent hub

And I promise that the people you’ve been itching to work with will come running and that the people you employ will walk 6 inches taller.