28 Aug Building things a different way

If you’re a client who hires big agencies, you probably suspect there is a lot of overhead between you and the person doing the work. There is.

Layoffs, restructures, and pivots. AI is causing a lot of rapid change within the creative industries. The recent results posted by WPP are a sign of what is happening across the entire industry. The big players like WPP are trimming thousands of people (9000 so far in two years). Who were these people? What were their roles? They are keeping the precise breakdowns quiet but from what I understand it seems administrative, duplicated and task-execution roles are out; technical, data and creative roles are staying. 

So, AI is displacing task-based roles rather than senior creative or client leadership. 

The obvious conundrum I see is what happens to junior creatives? How are they going to learn to take over from the seniors as the old folk age out, if they are already being replaced and don’t have the experience? 

David Droga argues the technology levels the playing field by putting us all at a new starting line. He suggests that we are all learning what Ai can do at the same time so a junior has as much chance of getting ahead as a senior.

There’s truth in that, but I’m not sure it’s as level as it sounds. Maybe both a junior and a senior can get a similar looking output, but knowing which output is interesting and worth digging deeper on and what is just surface level gloss still takes experience.

Droga says it himself: success will require a blend of irrational, emotional, and context-based creative decisions – and thats takes a years learn.

AI is collapsing the workflow chain. 

The old agency model was a relay. Your brief passed through account managers and project managers before it reached anyone who could actually make something. You paid for the whole chain and sometimes never met the maker. 

That chain is broken. The coordination those layers existed to manage is largely gone, which means the person doing the work can be the person you talk to. A single skilled maker with AI leverage now covers ground that used to need five people passing work between them. The old structure was expensive. 

Today AI is not necessarily making the work faster but it does make the current agency model hard to swallow when you can deal directly with leading senior creatives harnessing AI and covering the ground of five people.

Now that the chain is gone, the thing that’s left is the person who actually wants to make your thing, and I believe that matters more than any system built to commodify it.

I’ve worked with hundreds of clients. One thing I often see is the energy shift when we get to have a ‘creative’ meeting or presentation. They come alive. They get excited. Their products or ideas are coming to life. That excitement isn’t just because it looks good. When a designer or creative is full of enthusiasm, it’s usually because they can see how the idea is going to work for you – how it could shift your audience in a way that pays off for your business. Good creatives blend the commercial brain with the visual brain to make something effective. We get excited because we can see when it clicks.

In the old model the maker is a resource being managed, buried at the end of the chain, often burnt out. Direct-to-maker means you’re working with someone who actually wants to do the work and loves doing the work! Designers and art directors are genuinely excited to build the actual work and that excitement is contagious. You end up more invested, more ambitious, more willing to push. 

This isn’t a cliché.

Ask any designer you know. Ask them how many times they’ve been told they have no more time to spend on that logo or that brochure design. Ask them how many ‘free-time’ hours have they spent on work just for the sheer joy of it or to see something taken to a new level – even when no one is paying for it. I’ve been doing this for 26 years and I still do it. 

There must be a better way to build an agency that harnesses the power of enthusiasm and joy and balances it with fair pay and reasonable timelines. Creative types love working with people. We love presenting and discussing ideas. We love creating unique and wonderful things for each client so they feel special and achieve the results they want.

The alternative is the continual commodification of the human desire to create. And the perpetual cycle of burnout, not from the work itself, but from the pressures of how agencies work today. I don’t want to build it this way anymore. I think the future belongs to the makers.