Blog
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Choosing the right agency to work at
July 26, 2011 | POSTED BY: Congregation Partners | Comments: 0
One of the best Cannes Masterclasses was a talk by the guys from 72 and Sunny on choosing the right agency to work at. The talk’s been summarised by Robbin Ingvarsson over on his blog and it’s really interesting stuff.
Reputation, Location, Salary? All these things matter but if your aim is to grow you should look out for another greatly important factor: agency culture.
The most important career decision you can make is the culture you choose to grow in. Their advice is to look for a culture that doesn’t only produce great work but also great people.They broke agency culture into five points and shared simple ways on how to recognize it.
1. Collaboration
If you get into a culture that values collaboration, there’s room for you to contribute. Places that value collaboration tend not to be about the person, they tend to be about ‘THE BEST IDEA WINS’. This is not about people or ego, it’s about the idea. How you recognize it:
• How are people seated? Departments? Integrated? Floors?
• Do they assign ideas to people? Groups? The boss? Name on the door?
• How do they review work? In the open? Corner office? Small/big?
2. Generosity
Is important because your early career should be about learning, not just output. And it takes generosity to teach. A culture of generosity will allow people to explore their own ideas, potential, find their own voice and learn from failure. How you recognize it:
• Do co-workers celebrate your success as their own? Do they want what you want for yourself?
• Ask who has grown and developed the most last year. Do they actively think about it? • How do they give and share credit?
• What’s the approach to training and education? How do they handle career reviews?
3. Courage
As creative people, you should be wired for courage. You need an organization that stands up for brave ideas, or you will learn fear. How you recognize it:
• Do you look at their work and ask ‘How the hell did they do that?’
• How many ideas do they bring to a pitch?
• Have they ever resigned business for a creative or cultural differences?
4. Accountability
A culture of accountability quickly teaches that success or failure matters. Being accountable for the outcome, either positive or negative, is leadership. Be in a culture that shares your definition of success and that teaches you to lead. How you recognize it: • Do they embrace metrics? Do set them at all?
• What is the ultimate win to them? Awards? £££? Long relationships? Happy clients?
• What is the compensation structure for clients? For staff? For leaders? What does it reward? Performance? Seniority? Internal political success?
5. Ambition
It’s important to understand your personal ambitions and find an agency that shares the same ambitions. If you’re missmatch it’s going to be a bad relationship. If you aspire to greatness, attach yourself to an organization that aspires to greatness. How you recognize it:
• What goals do they aspire to? Success as defined by clients, industry or culture?
• Do they talk about what they could do better more than what they do well?
• Do they visibly push themselves?
• Do they attract ‘Challenger’ clients and brands?
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The Recipe For Digital Success
June 22, 2011 | POSTED BY: Congregation Partners | Comments: 0
By Matt
The Ingredients:
Thinking of making a move into digital? To truly look like you know what you are doing you will need to be in possession of the following items:
- 2 Swedes (if you really can’t find Swedes you could substitute Danes)
- A Brazilian
- An Argentinian
- Someone who once worked at Crispin Porter (if you can’t find one of these you can substitute someone who once worked at Goodby Silverstein)
- Anyone who’s worked at AKQA (if you can’t find one of these you can substitute anyone who’s worked at R/GA)
- An underage Head of Social Media Strategy (in child-labour terms, social media is the new chimney sweeping)
- A digital hot-shop (must have heaps of awards and little or no margin)
- Pots of money
The Recipe:
Blindly follow these six easy steps and you will be rewarded with the exactly same results every time:
- Break the digital hot-shop and grate the Swedes
- Whip the Brazilian and the Argentine
- Mix someone from CP with anyone from AKQA, add the teenage social media specialist and beat thoroughly
- Combine all the ingredients in an empty vessel being sure to pick out the remaining bits of common sense
- Sprinkle liberally with pots of money and grill until both revenue and reputation are burnt
- Throw the whole thing away and start again (blame the Scandinavians)
Alternatively you could just give us a call…
Image: Photo of The Swedish Chef from the Muppet Wiki
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Talent = Aptitude x Opportunity
June 16, 2011 | POSTED BY: Congregation Partners | Comments: 6
By Matt
Talent = Aptitude x Opportunity
Aptitude – the innate or acquired capacity to do something
Opportunity – an appropriate or favorable time or occasion to do something
It’s a familiar story and one that graces the pages of the advertising trade press around the world – Digital Tyro X leaves Advertising Agency Y ‘by mutual consent’ but why do ATL creative agencies still continue to struggle when it comes to delivering creative work outside of their usual channel remit? And, perhaps more importantly, why do so many ‘digital’ practitioners apparently fail to make the grade when they join these agencies?
Individual failures broadly fall into two categories – the rubber balls and the damp squibs.
Both types arrive to the fanfare of publicity generated by the host agency’s PR machine.
The rubber balls bounce in, in a flurry of energy, only to bounce straight out again with a similar velocity, usually within 6-9 months. Like lord Lucan these short tenures frequently vanish from people’s CV’s and do little lasting damage to either party.
The damp squibs are another matter. Squibs arrive with the latent promise of show-fireworks only to exit 18-24 months later with the limp splutter of indoor fireworks.
Neither party can brush a two-year failure under the carpet nor off the CV for that matter and in the case of the squib the damage to both the agency and the individual is much more pronounced. Confidence and credibility are severely tested.
But why does it happen? How can people who months earlier were feted as the future fail so completely and so quickly?
Sometimes it is the fault of the individual, a flawed interview process, occasionally an insurmountable cultural barrier – but these are the exceptions and in the majority of cases it is opportunity, or more precisely, the lack of it that is the root cause of failure.
Let’s get one thing straight – these people are genuinely talented. They are smart, creative and strategic, diligent and hard working which is the reason that you employed them in the first place.
The trouble is talent remains inert without the context of opportunity. It becomes the solution to a non-existent problem and as a result is quickly redundant (literally in many cases).
The ridiculously high failure rate is down to the sheer number of otherwise intelligent people ‘joining companies without a job to go to’. In many cases the individual’s first role is often to try and write their own job description (really). How can you hire someone for a six-figure sum with no idea of what they will actually be doing? It’s madness and the idea that it might remotely succeed as a strategy requires a level of blind faith that is traditional remit of religious zealots or the mentally ill.
The other enormous elephants in the room are the clients.
There is often a huge disparity between what agencies feel they should offer their clients and what those clients are prepared to pay for. If there is no client buy-in then the business-case seldom stacks up long enough to sustain the level of investment required to generate new clients.
Of course there are other contributing factors – lack of investment for one, lack of a common language, lack of knowledge and fear of failure all play a part too but these are minor-league compared to no actual job and no real revenue potential.
So what’s the answer? Well there are two answers really. If you are an agency considering a shiny new digital hire and you can’t say what said person will actually be doing on a day-to-day basis and what that activity will subsequently be worth in revenue terms then DON’T HIRE THEM.
Conversely if you are a digital practitioner considering a shiny new role at a big advertising agency and you don’t have a job description (that they have written) and no one can tell you what success looks like, or how it will be measured then RUN AWAY NOW.
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How to change the culture of an agency
June 7, 2011 | POSTED BY: Congregation Partners | Comments: 1
By Tim
We spend lots of time helping brands and agencies cope with the stress of a constantly moving technology landscape. Adapting from broadcast to network communications and the growth of people powered content is a challenge to most organisations out there. I can help people understand what’s going on but I know that won’t work in isolation. Training’s important but to really develop an organisation you need to do far more. Edward Boches has written a great post on this where he identifies five key ingredients required for changing a business:
Pressure from the top
A company-wide vision
An investment of money, time and resources
Actionable steps to be taken
Measures of successHe points out that if you take any one of those 5 away you’ll more than likely fail. For years Mullen (his agency) tried to accelerate its digital transformation but only had three or four of the five. They applied pressure, but didn’t have buy-in across the agency. They made investments but weren’t always sure of the specific actionable steps. Eventually they figured it out. Laid out a vision that everyone could buy into; Weeded out the few who wouldn’t. Made investments in people and resources and took specific steps to accelerate change. Moved to Boston, dramatically changed space and redefined the composition of creative teams. And while they’re still not done, it’s been working.
Building on these 5, I think it’s worth expanding on 2 areas:
1. Education
2. PartnershipsEducation. How to keep people informed of what’s technically possible? How to get creative teams inspired by the potential of Google/Twitter APIs? People like me can help naturalise teams to the new landscape, behaviours, interesting platforms and tools. But all this changes fast. What I prefer to do is give people a good understanding of the basics and encourage them to be curious for themselves. Of course it’s worth building partnerships with other organisations. Outside speakers are great but over time the best approach is blending this with your own people taking on much of the knowledge sharing.
Partnerships. Build relationships with the best tech companies to ensure they come in regularly to inspire your teams (and follow the talks with workshops, get people to apply what they’ve just seen). Consider loaning office space to interesting tech startups or sponsor them in other ways. Ad agencies and tech companies have complementary skill-sets so they should clearly play nicer together. Agencies aren’t great at tech projects and tech startups aren’t great at marketing what they do. For me it’s a no-brainer. It just makes sense for them to work more closely and try to create a mutually beneficial relationships. Partnerships are, for me, fundamental to all good businesses in the future. Collaboration is becoming more and more important (both internally and externally). Companies who can create smart, robust ways to work with others (whether it be internal departments, suppliers or customers) will thrive. Those that can’t will always struggle.
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4 Things the internet won’t change
May 31, 2011 | POSTED BY: Congregation Partners | Comments: 1
Super post on what’s changing and what’s not changing about business when it comes to the Internet.
In brief: A McKinsey study estimates that Internet economic output is bigger than Spain and growing faster than Brazil. Web-intensive SMEs grow twice as fast, export twice as much, and are more profitable than non-Web-enabled, the McKinsey study concluded. eBay employs 17,000 people but 1.3 million earn a living from it.
With all this talk of revolution, disruption, and really big change, struck by the things that are not changing.
1. A great customer experience differentiates winners from losers. Winners are differentiated not by the technology but by the quality of the experience they offer customers.
2. The human side is critical to the use of technology. The biggest barrier to the spread of promising technology is the professionals. The same issue was raised about education. Adoption of new tools and incorporating new technologies into business or organisational models requires visionary, responsive leaders willing to change and to use the tools themselves.
3. Money needs to change hands. The Internet spreads faster when content is free but creators need to be paid. For all the freedom and ease of the virtual world, people still need to earn a living from what they produce.
4. The winner-take-all nature of Internet businesses poses risks of new monopolies controlling everything. That was one of many reasons that government officials want to protect citizens from Internet risks, from piracy to child pornography. For every problem — piracy, bandwidth, security — others argued that a private sector technology solution would be better, faster than a government solution.
According to McKinsey telecoms are capturing most of the wealth being generated from the Internet. For all the new world hype, the old world has a major role to play. And sometimes focusing on what is not changing help us figure out how to best master changes. We still need to find, delight, and excite customers. We need business models that pay people fairly for their work. Businesses must make a credible case to government that they act in the public interest. And the best asset for mastering change is still that old classic: leadership.