We broke the machine that made the magic
Nick Kavanagh - chief strategy officer of iProspect, a dentsu company - dives into the importance of process for getting the best out of teams and for clients.
Ask anyone of a certain vintage working in media or for a media-owner, and they’ll generally make two observations about the state of the industry.
First, “It’s not as much fun as it used it be, is it….?”
And the other?
“Where have all the ideas gone…?”
The most common theory is that this a covid thing. That people have become too used to hiding behind screens and keyboards. That we no longer want to socialise with colleagues like we once did or that the inexorable march of data and performance has killed brand advertising.
And whilst I don’t believe the above is 100% accurate, I do think there’s a grain of truth to them both. Especially in the ideas space. Australia has fallen from 2nd to 11th in the Cannes Lions rankings after all. Smoke without fire and all that.
But there may be contributing factors that pre-date the pandemic of 2019.
In fact, you can probably look as far back as the Lehman Brothers-induced financial crisis of 2008 for one. And although these two events are separated by a decade, add in the publication of How Brands Grow and its doctrine of maximising reach at all cost – plus the swathes of talent leaving the industry in the last few years – and you ask yourself is it any wonder things changed?
But what did change exactly?
What were the industrial tectonic plates shifting so imperceptibly under the surface – whilst stories of sub-prime mortgages, the Pareto Principle and MMM washed over us – that meant work wasn’t as fun as it used to be? Or that we’re not implementing culture shaping ideas in the volume we once did?
Credit: iStock.com/tommy
Reflecting on how my own experience and that of our people differs now vs., say 2010, I’ve asked myself why might things feel so different to how they were?
Well, for a start there is way less drinking, that’s absolutely true. And for that matter smoking also. In my first job you could have a cigarette in the office after 6:30pm. And although this is obviously good for so many reasons; I don’t believe that the fun we feel we’ve lost is linked to no longer spending Thursday nights/ Friday lunchtimes in the local agency boozer. Although it was excellent fun.
I actually think one of the major cultural things that’s changed within agency life, is that we’re collaborating less. And that this is due to the lack of one special thing – process.
Process in terms of how we as agencies are briefed by clients. Process in terms of how agencies [and clients] approach the solving of briefs. Process in terms of how agencies work together and with publishers. Damn, even our internal processes may even need more work.
Now I’m sure it still happens. Of course, there are agencies and clients with finely crafted IMC processes and ways of working, optimised to getting the very best work from all stakeholders. But I doubt it’s the norm.
But it was.
It would be commonplace for the agencies working on a brief – often from competing networks, with overlapping skill sets and competing commercial agendas – to solve the brief and the challenges within it, together. To shape the brief with the client, discuss the merits of potential creative directions and how they might be brought to life in media, then work together to craft an integrated solution.
Yet as culture and audiences and media has become ever more fragmented, and with it the need to collaborate ever more necessary, as an industry we’ve gone the other way. We’ve allowed a cultural movement towards social, cultural and national insularity to infect our own practices and methods of extracting the best from one another.
Credit: istock.com/miniseries
My suspicion is that it’s relatively common for a campaign to go to market with the agencies responsible never being in the same room. Many may never have even met one another; the media agency simply handed assets without truly understanding the idea that drove the execution. The creative team deprived of the additional stimulus of working with connections people to maximise an idea’s potential. It’s enough to just get the stuff out there to as many people as possible, rather than seeing medium and message as partners that ebb and flow symbiotically through their respective developments.
Working at Naked you got a sense people loved coming to our office and seeing the weird world we’d built at the bottom of Foveaux Street at the top of our shitty lift. Similarly, I used to love visiting different agencies and publishers to have a nose around their offices and see how others built a culture. Instead, we rarely leave our offices. We hide behind our screen or default to Teams calls, rather than participating in debate, IRL, about the work. Ideating and collaborating. Living and breathing the process of advertising.
And it was hard. And I remember feeling totally out of my depth at times. You’d come into conflict with other agencies or tough account people, but my goodness was it fun. The hard stuff always is.
You may read this and think I’m talking bollocks. And that’s cool.
But this year, our agency are leading more into process. With how we work with our clients, with our partners but also with ourselves. Afterall, as someone much cleverer than me once said, the journey is the reward. Plus, hopefully, just hopefully, some campaign work we can all be proud of.
Nick Kavanagh is the chief strategy officer of iProspect – a dentsu company.
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It’s up to leaders to be honest when there is a process and collaboration gap, and to motivate team members to get excited by a world of ideas.
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Interesting view point. I’m not sure this is true of the whole industry, I see this more as a Hold Co.trait as a result of the years of over complication, cost cutting and separation of skill sets within network businesses into ‘specialisms’ to maximise revenue extraction from clients.
Couple that with the now not-so-secret publisher rebate models employed by holding groups limiting which publishers even get a look at the brief and the fact that half the talent has vacated hold cos (much to the benefit of the indie scene I might add) and you are left with what feels like quite a vacuous environment devoid of creativity and soul.
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