Don’t be a Hack Agency

Courtesy of Todd LaRoche

From Guy Mastrion, Chief Global Creative Officer, Palio

The best agencies create opportunity for great work to happen. Opportunity starts with access to good clients, brands, and assignments. But it is also much more than that.

Creating the opportunity to do great work means creating an environment where creative folks feel that their ideas are supported and that they are respected; there is a belief by everyone that the creative team’s ideas solve client problems and help drive business for the agency. It’s an understanding that ideas have relevance and meaning that grow and expand with the needs of the brand. Ideas that, when nurtured as they are shared among all constituents, become the driver of subsequent ideas. In this way, the ideas are always turned on and live beyond the “page.” They become the platform for client engagement, not simply the next deliverable or something that can simply be turned on and off like a light switch. Stated simply, there’s a fundamental belief that ideas are the currency of success.

Opportunity also means creating the necessary time, space, and atmosphere, because ideas don’t always happen on demand. First and foremost, the best creative minds want to know for themselves that they had the opportunity to come up with their best work, a simply brilliant idea that no one else has thought of or a startlingly unique execution. It means that they don’t fail themselves, their client, and their agency. They must feel that they’ve had the opportunity to create the best idea anyone could have ever imagined.

For even the best creative minds, their work is both a burden and a joy, a struggle and triumph. It’s emotional, not mechanical. It’s thoughtful, philosophical, smart, clever, and well-crafted, not trite, familiar, dull-witted, and sloppy.

The best ideas solve problems for consumers and clients and create opportunity for more great ideas to flourish.

It’s been my observation after many years of working in many agencies that it’s an almost universal tendency to culturally minimize these efforts in what becomes the “need” to drive the budget, increase the margin, etc–as if these objectives are mutually exclusive. This essentially guts an agency’s core drive and pollutes its essence. And, frankly, the effect is usually the exact opposite of what made the agency successful in the first place.

The values, talents, and commitments of truly professional creative folk struggling to achieve greatness for their clients is an ideal that they hold as their sole responsibility. Great agencies never dismiss their creatives’ needs as carping, their insight into client business as substandard, and their challenges to any given situation as unprofessional and not “business-like.” It’s my perspective that agencies that fail to flourish have developed a “factory-floor” psychology about getting the work done. To those who exist in environments like this, the experience suggests that throughput, vs output, is what matters most.

In the current economic climate, like so many recessions that have come before, there will be winners, losers, and those who barely survive. Times like these really test an agency and reveal what it’s made of. It’s a time to push like hell and not settle for second best because in the end all we have is our work and our reputation. In an expanding economy everyone looks like a hero. But in these times, the weak, indifferent, and mediocre will fail.

It’s a time for the best ideas; the most thoughtful, strategic, insightful, energetic, witty, powerful, and disruptive ideas. It’s simply not a time to shy away.