Think like an entrepreneur not Mad Men/Women
As Cannes Lions are handed out this week, Ash Ringrose from Soap – Linked by Isobar, asks the industry: why are we more focused on boosting our egos than the bottom line?
The recent coverage of all the scam work coming out just in time for Cannes begs the question: why aren’t agency heads angry at the wasted potential and more focused on ideas that make their agency rich, rather than famous?
I think we should invest those valuable hours in creating the next billion dollar company like AirBNB not the next Smart Thong that tells you when the surf is good.
Awards have their value but that value to an agency and its staff is limited. After a few months, everyone has forgotten and you find yourself chasing the next award for that high. Maybe awards are used to attract talent to the agency? But that talent wants to win more awards. It’s a vicious cycle.
One that costs agencies hundreds of thousands a year in time, external costs and entry fees.
My reason for writing this isn’t to poop on agencies doing scam work but to inspire them to put that effort into something else, something that if successful can generate revenue and then hopefully sustain itself.
Think like an entrepreneur not Mad Men/Women.
In 2013 we stopped using our down-time creating mobile games (which as a small nimble agency wasn’t much time at all and resulted in two mobile games for ourselves in five years) and backed ourselves with a dedicated games studio called SMG Studio.
We put four of our team and gave them the freedom to make whatever games they wanted.
The studio now employs 13 people full-time and the five games released in the past three years have generated 20 million downloads. More importantly, SMG is now Soap’s biggest client. That’s something I’m really proud of because clients can be fickle and global pitches can result in you losing a client for no fault of your own. We’re not looking to fire ourselves anytime soon.
The time, effort and budget to do this is less than what some agencies spend on award entries to Cannes in one year alone.
The goal of SMG was to build a sustainable mobile games studio that also had tangible benefits to Soap as an agency. This is millions of dollars in revenue, expanded skills sets and experiences for the team and in-depth knowledge of the mobile scene which is an ever growing and evolving space that none of our competitors can match us on.
It also delivers the satisfaction of creating your own IP and having full creative freedom for your team.
This has boosted the team much more than a piece of metal ever did. For me personally, getting our first million downloads on a game was more validating than any of the hundreds of awards we’d won in the past.
Running our own games studio has given us the latitude to hire people who’d normally never step foot in an ad agency. They don’t know or care what a Cannes Lion is.
A similar example is Threadless.com. Its founders launched the site originally as a side project to their web design company Skinny Corp. Within two years Threadless dominated their business and they stopped outside work and since have grown Threadless into selling more than one million tee-shirts a year with revenue more than $30 million USD.
So if you work at an agency ask yourself ‘why aren’t we just doing that great idea we had but the client didn’t buy for ourselves?’ And if you are the boss of an agency ask yourself why your team is focused on boosting their ego more than your bottom line.
It could be a games studio like we did, or maybe you’ll produce a TV series or film?
Or start a coffee brand or fashion label. Or even just a podcast that generates millions of viewers each week. Whatever it is, it’ll probably be more worthwhile and satisfying than a scam piece of work you hope won’t be called out by the press.
Hey, you might even be able to enter it into various awards if it’s successful.
Ash Ringrose is a founder of Soap – Linked by Isobar and SMG
Nice article.
It is a problem that is more complex than it seems.
First, allow me to state that I am not a supporter of scam work in any way. It’s a disease of this industry.
Secondly, I’m not a supporter of awards anymore either. They have lost their way. Quite often, work that is awarded, although not ‘scam’, appeals to nobody but a target market like an awards jury.
However, the problem lies within the first sentence of this article: “why aren’t agency heads angry at the wasted potential and more focused on ideas that make their agency rich, rather than famous?”
Put yourself in a creative’s shoes. They already work an amazing amount of unpaid overtime – late nights and weekends, often week after week. Why would they want to work on an idea that makes the agency richer – they’re already being exploited.
‘But they’re doing lots of time for award-orientated work anyway’, I hear you say. And here’s the issue: that is what is going to earn them a pay-rise, possible promotion, or job offer from another agency.
I did plenty of effective, yet non-award-worthy work that went mostly unnoticed by my former bosses. It certainly went unnoticed on my salary.
However, with lions and pencils, I received some very generous increases.
As long as this industry continues to exploit its employees, and financially reward awards, the mess we have now will remain.
On the other hand, if agency’s value their employees properly and refuse to run on a business model that relies on exploitation, things may change.
And of course, one has to ask the question, ‘if you’re a business who makes things, are you still actually an ad agency?’ Perhaps you might call yourself a client who just happens to derive from an agency background and now has an in-house ad team?
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