The agency of the future is not an agency
Strategist Matt Kendall discusses the future of agency models and how distributed and autonomous specialist networks are the way of the future.
“No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.” ― Philip K. Dick
In an industry where your capital walks in and out of the door each day, the value you can bring a client all comes down to talent.
How can any one company house the talent required to deliver the optimal solution for each business challenge? Briefs are already calling for teams consisting of an infinitely diverse list of specialties. No agency can provide that.
Between the Devil and The Deep Blue Sea
If the agency outsources, increasing proportions of its budgets are siphoned out of the company to accommodate for this. Over time, this eats away at their margins and they miss their aggressive growth targets.
If they try to keep the budget in-house, they are either making do with the talent they have, or they bring talent on to the payroll who may not be needed on a regular basis. Who can tell when change is so fast and random?
Entropy doesn’t lend itself to standardisation.
In my previous post, I suggested that new models will emerge that are distributed and nodal in nature. The one that excites me the most is a co-operative model of distributed and autonomous specialist networks.
Not only does this model better reflect and adjust to the digital networks we communicate with, but there is an incredible potential for a new level of autonomy and mutual prosperity.
But what does this look like? And how do you deliver the talent that is needed each and every time?
The Hollywood Model
Hollywood provides some reference. Specifically, Ocean’s Eleven and the approach George Clooney takes when he lands a backer for the ultimate casino heist. His solution calls for a crack team of specialists including con men, an explosives expert, a hacker, a pickpocket and even an acrobat.
The Hollywood Model involves assembling a crack team of specialists to support your core staff
As an approach to business (rather than casino heists), this is known as the Hollywood Model. Film studios have been using it for years. They keep a core staff at studio HQ and then engage partners and crew with the specific skills required to best execute the film.
If you’ve ever been on a TVC shoot, you’ve seen the model in action. The different teams on the shoot may or may not have worked together before, but they all have their role and are specialists at it.
With the right coordination, everyone knows how to work with each other and what to do to get the job done and done right. All at once and in parallel.
To translate this to the wider agency function would require a formalisation of the many informal professional connections out there into bounded networks of digital, business, creator and communications professionals.
There are agencies such as Victors and Spoils that have experimented with crowdsourcing. co: is doing great things with its collective and collaborative approach. But there is potential to go beyond this and the confines of an actual agency and into independent networks.
These networks would coalesce into flexible project teams to cooperate on specific projects. Combining skills and resources, they would then disband once the project is complete.
Teams could even convene to pitch for retainer style accounts, so the client knows they are receiving a purpose-built team and solution for their business problem.
Future Of Work
Current technologies (such as Slack, Trello, G-Suite, Dropbox, Xero and myriad other cloud-based SaaS tools) and share spaces distribute these cooperative principals even further, minimising overheads.
All you need is a laptop with an internet connection, your skills and these services and your business can be profitable, within a week.
Instead of a renovated inner-city warehouse with ping-pong table and bar, you can work from your sunroom at home with your dog at your feet.
Given the need to commute daily is no longer required, you can move up the coast and surf every morning and evening without taking on a crippling Sydney mortgage. Only venturing into the city a day or two a week for workshops and meetings.
Fishburners offers start-ups office space
If working from home isn’t your thing, there are new and affordable share space offices cropping up all over the city, like Fishburners, WeWork and Work Club. Here you can work alongside other start-ups and creative professionals collaborating and cross-pollinating ideas and opportunities.
Due to the structure of this model, there is no margin; no-one gets the cream. Each specialist in the network receives value. Especially the client.
Alternative marketplace
There is the potential to create an alternative marketplace. One that will allow specialist experts to apply their skills and talents to projects they want to work on.
A market that provides unprecedented freedom and prosperity. Where three (or even two) days work nets you in the vicinity of a full week’s pay at an agency (while still charging the client much less than any agency would). And you won’t be pulling unpaid overtime and weekend work.
You could use that spare time to take yoga classes, learn a new language, spend more time with your kids, give your skills to love jobs or pro bono clients, surf, or simply take more projects on to earn more bank. It is entirely up to you.
A new ‘agency of the future.’
We are at the crossroads.
Either technology slams us headlong into a future, where as knowledge workers we are just cogs in a machine. A machine playing a zero sum game of productivity for holding company profits and share prices.
Or even worse:
“Being an Uber driver moonlighting as Taskrabbit moonlighting as doggy-masseuse to your nearest branch of the Kardashian Dynasty” Umair Haque
Or we can herald in a new era of digital humanism. As Douglas Rushkoff evangelises, we can re-set the operating system so there is the opportunity for collaboration, co-creation, connection and the preconditions for mutual prosperity.
It’s re-directing the promise of the digital economy away from exponential automation and corporate profits, to making it about human potential. Having it work for us, rather than us for it. To have these incredible technologies augment human autonomy rather than replace it.
If you are good at what you do and you’re future focused, you are no doubt being head-hunted for a big new role. Don’t take it. Take the leap and bust out on your own. Your skills will be in demand and you will be able to pay the bills. You can freelance while you’re building your brand and network.
If you’re an indie doing great work for excellent clients, don’t sell to the global consultancies or holding companies. Don’t take on the golden handcuffs and watch all that equity you built up be destroyed by the growth juggernaut.
If you’re an indie doing great work, don’t take the golden handcuffs and watch all that equity you built up be destroyed by the growth juggernaut
Small is beautiful. You don’t need scale to take on bigger, more interesting projects. Connect with other like-minded indies and specialists to go up against the incumbents and win the good stuff with a whole new approach. And you still get to do what you love to do, the way you love to do it.
We will never have this chance again to create a gig economy worth getting excited about. An alternative market is emerging. A future of work that fosters genuine agency for its participants — and a whole new take on the agency of the future.
This article was published originally on LinkedIn and is republished with the author’s permission.
Matt Kendall is a freelance strategist
Not sure what the agency of the future looks like. But I reckon the strategist of the future looks a lot like today. A wanker.
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Well said Matt. Agencies locked into profits-at-any-cost models mostly see brainpower-on-demand as a function of client servicing capacity – overload, maternity leave, unexpected vacancies etc. Clients are the losers. Smarter agencies see the value of teaming their principals with specialist consultants to deliver a better product faster. Clients are the winners.
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Some good points there.
As a business coach to creative services industries I agree that the current model isn’t sustainable as a wide spread industry, and there is a weakening of the talent base which ultimately undermines the business value. There is much that can be done to change the operational process to be more efficient and keep more cash in-house though and still add value to the clients.
The Hollywood model is a fairly old way of working, actually, and there are hiccups there too if not done right. It is a false saving to hire freelancers when the rest of the business is under-utilised not just because of the obvious cost of people sitting around but also because of the lost overheads – so it is a double loss, and is often an invisible loss that catches up with businesses in the long run. They live on the cashflow and focus on the P&L which is too long range, and it catches up with them long term. I’ve seen businesses go broke on this model.
It can’t be purely a model of co-operation either, because the ever important strategy and brand objectives can be lost with a bunch of individuals all plugging away at their own game. (The one with the loudest voice or new shiny thing winning). I believe that there needs to be someone working with the client’s best interest in mind, and then pulling the right team of providers together. This is a different model again. The clients/brands are becoming capable of doing this themselves now, more and more, and that’s the real issue – leaving the industry scrambling after the projects or to do the execution only. That in itself isn’t a bad model completely, and businesses can flourish on it if done right, but they often struggle with the idea of becoming this.
Ultimately, there isn’t one universal right or wrong way – this industry is full of clients/brands with different needs and there is a multitude of business models that work for the different niches. The trick is just in marrying the right ones together.
The way around it is new recruiting, new process, really understanding your fees and the market, getting the cost per chair calculations right, independent strategic services and project management services done by people who have no vested interest in the solution for the client, matching the right providers for the brand’s needs (reviewed at the time and being flexible along the way too to meet changing objectives and capacity) …..and who makes sure that the brand is actually getting the best solution.
This is a complex issue and sweeping concepts that suggest there is a one-size-fits all is where the industry is really going wrong in my humble experience.
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Surely this going to be the natural evolution of platforms like freelancer.com and Upwork?
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Ummm. Another article short on the advice, sorry. There isn’t one model that’s unsustainable. It’s a myriad of models full of two types of professionals. Those that are honest about their capabilities and limitations and those that aren’t. If you think there’s one model you should get out more.
There is nothing new about outsourcing to specialist consultants you just need to give a shit about whether it’s adding value. and keep and eye on budget leakage. TrinityP3 (for one) always has good advice on this for one.
When “lifer” politicians think that they know best about politics so people should stick their naïve noses in you end up with Trumpism.
Advertising might have some parallels.
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Teams could even convene to pitch for retainer style accounts.
There’s the problem.
1.) retainer style accounts don’t exist as much as they used to
2.) if they do, client wants to know you can support retained hours with a full-time team… where do they come from?
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I hate to say it – but as an ex ad game person – i have done precisely that of late and it works extremely well!…. Retained talent is expensive talent and not always nor necessarily the right talent for every opportunity/campaign/project that comes through the door… Why in todays age would you cop the huge over heads of salaries/bricks and mortar etc etc when you are so able to speedily pool together the right talent to get the job done – To the very best it can be for your end client and at a profitable margin?… By all means keep it up – but not for me and agree with the sentiment of this article…. Those moaning probably know their old agency days are somewhat numbered….
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Old news.
Tech industry has been way ahead on this pushing something called market networks. Already being done!
Satellite of love friends. Find the right team of people, regardless of location and you will find success. Clients buy people first and agencies second. A great agency team is like a car engine. Everyone plays and knows their part and works smoothly together for one overarching objective. Proven track records, combined with deep client relationships and the balls to jump out of the existing safety net of the old agency model are the key to success.
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Matt, this is way too binary.
Clients want service. At times service needs to be consistent, collaborative and on call for many roles.
Shared learning and thinking and a powerhouse of collective talent are the advantages of an agency. As is the workflow. There is not much place for developing talent in oceans 11. It’s also such a feat that it is worth making a movie about it.
For certain roles and projects this model can and does work.
But the agency brings much more power and value that is simply traded off here.
To maintain that combination and energy is they key.
This does not go far enough into explaining how to keep that magic.
Here’s are some answers:
-Build a new agency from the ground up, only top talent, who understand the world we are moving into. That is the only solution to agency.
-Allow work from home days for self important types (joke) and come together time, so that all members of the company are washed with the right thinking.
-Kill the fat. Be transparent. Deliver an office space that is smart and lean. Drop the hype (and cost). But a share space that inspires staff and clients alike. A great work environment with great teams colliding does provide a magic that is just not achieved in a distributed model. We all know that deep down.
-Deliver on top talent and charge properly. The industry needs a wake up call. Stop competing for zero. Ditch clients who won’t pay properly. Develop a CODE whereby pitches are regulated – ‘base pitch’. A top line response, then showing existing work only – being forced into pitches that cost in excess of $100,000 is ludicrous!!! It must end. It kills profit, disrupts teams, absorbs the best talent (who the clients then do not have access to). Holding groups, clients and agencies have pushed the model into a destructive territory, where sweat shop conditions are now the norm. Demand to be paid for work beyond ‘base pitch’ this. Clients / Marketers – front up here. End the practice. It’s just not right and holds no good will. You get a false reality. This is date night. It’s not who you end up living with.
No more unpaid pitch insanity.
-Get out of the holding groups. There goes your cream – to the USA, France, Japan etc Puclicly listed holding groups that need to show profit and growth. Matt you are right there. What professional would work for free on pitches and then send all of the profit oversees? Then try to get by with low level team support becuase there is no money.
But Matt, you know there is place for the new ‘agency’. There is also a place for the concepts you are talking of. Especially for some types of roles, on some types of work. In fact, more clients accessing top talent, that’s a win. But an agency is much more that this. It’s more than a production house.
The question is when an ‘agency’ type of company is the answer, what does it look like?
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