Co is for community

“The agency model is broken”

How many times have you heard that? Any industry publication - with a last-minute need for another article to balance out the ads - will surely have this subject as a just-in-case article title up its sleeve. (Look it up on Google: you’ll see tonnes of results.) And it’s been said for years. It’s a healthy statement – it makes you look at your agency (whether you’re in one or using one) and ask if things could be done differently, better.

Over time, many agency people (and clients) have concluded that it is broken, and they’ve tried really hard to change things: they’ve set up non-agencies that have, despite best efforts, turned into agencies. Or they have reimagined their agencies into, let’s be honest, just another agency. And broken again. (Or worse still, gone broke.)

There are exceptions, of course there are, but in the main, clients are faced with agencies that have become so complicated, so mired in process, so overhead-heavy that they’re not always getting their money’s worth; clients are not really getting the substantial advantage that agencies are supposed to offer.

Extra special

Think about it: when a client engages an agency, they’re getting way more than expertise. That engagement also includes fancy offices, financial targets set by the agency’s investors, upskilling trainees, pitching for other business, a ping-pong table, and a posh coffee machine. In fact, the expertise often disappears moments after the contract is signed – off to win more business, embroil itself in office politics and sign-off work done by the juniors. There’s a lot of fat in some client/agency relationships, and that’s not always fair – especially to the client.

The expertise is there: there’s an embarrassment of riches in our industry; much of it hidden within agencies. But that’s changing. Covid-19 ignited quite a big change – lots of small agencies collapsed and people started working from home: two ingredients that together spell ‘freelance’. The freelance market is blossoming – you are twice as likely to encounter a freelancer in the creative industry than in any other.

Before we wax lyrical about ‘the new model’, we’re not saying the old model is dead. It’s evolving – traditional agencies are still doing brilliant stuff, still re-defining the way we interact with brands, still surprising and delighting their clients and their clients’ target markets. There are lots of agencies getting it right. And there is a new breed of agency that’s not an agency, it’s an interesting and viable alternative.

Brief and brilliant

Think of how films are made. Long gone are the days of ‘the studio’ where all the requisite skills were on the payroll and the studio itself commissioned each film. Now, each film is realised by a special combination of talent, pulled together and coordinated specifically for the project – doing what they love doing in the pursuit of something bigger, something amazing. Once the film’s done, the happy band disbands… happily – they’re paid when they’re working on the project. And not when they’re not!

The agency world is rather like the film industry of yesteryear: very powerful, very capable, very imaginative, and very heavy. Except that the work must be commissioned by clients rather than simply dreamed up. Agencies can’t just choose a continuous stream of projects that require all their in-house talent and then sell it – it doesn’t work like that. The unique feel of a film comes from the special chemistry created by the particular mix of talent required to make it. No agency can house all the talent needed to deliver the best solution to every brief they chase.

The emerging alternative in the agency world is like Hollywood – without the plastic! (Or that big sign on the hill.) Well, maybe not Hollywood, more like a production studio, but let’s say Hollywood – it sounds far more glamorous!

The new agency isn’t an agency, it’s invented, united and concentrated into precisely what the client needs to achieve a specific goal. And then it stops, ready to re-configure for the next project. Never the same arrangement, never the same output. Rarely exactly the same team.

Get together and change the world

We’re talking about a community. A community is a group of people or entities that is motivated by common interest to achieve a common objective.

Still sounds like an agency, doesn’t it?

Freelance talent (sharing common characteristics) is gathered into the community to work as a club with a core team that defines the spirit of the club and ensures enduring client understanding.

It’s starting to sound quite different now.

This club aims to reduce client costs by eliminating extraneous overheads and applying only the required expertise for the duration of the project. Sounds very refreshing.

While we’re at it, maybe we should stop saying freelancer as well. They’re talent, they’re experts, they’re contributors, they’re people. The word freelance still carries connotations of ‘outside’, of ‘temporary’, of ‘not actually caring’. This couldn’t be further from the truth. People freelance because it means they get to do what they’re good at and they get to do what they love. And they’ve got to be good – or they won’t get any more work: there’s a lot of talent out there.

The community really matters. The will of the community and the experience of the team that is assembled to deliver a project. Not a group of strangers, nor a company of familiars – a blended squad of the two, coordinated by a core of associates that sits at the heart of the community. If you still want to think of this as an agency, think of an agency launching specifically for your project. And then reconfiguring for the next one.

That’s what we do: we pull together the squad of expertise required into a club to deliver a project and disband it once achieved. The expertise that we select is seasoned, extremely capable and they love what they do. That’s why they don’t want to work in agencies anymore: they want to do the work themselves, not simply oversee it. We’re breaking that odd professional quirk of ‘the better you get at what you do, the less you get to do it’.