Will the last creative ad agency please turn off the light.

The original ad agencies came into being for the same reason that most business ideas do: To fill a gap in the market.

That gap was the lack of unfettered creative thinking available to businesses: Ad agencies proved to be invaluable for marketers who, as a collective, tended to have a more rigid and linear mindset tethered to their bottom line.

At the risk of a slight over-simplification, the core of the original ad agency was ‘the goose that laid the golden egg’ – the creative person who was able to transmogrify a marketing (communications) issue into an invaluable brand asset.

These ‘golden geese’ adhered to a saying of mine that I like to repeat ad nauseam: A great idea doesn’t care who has it; in a few rare instances top creative people were just like any other office worker – reliable, timely, even-keeled - but the most extraordinary creative people tended to be eccentric.

Fun-loving, relentlessly curious, brilliant, mercurial, inconsistent, precious, bad-tempered, drunk, inappropriate, all perhaps contained in the word ‘bohemian’ - the sensible folks handling ad agencies' accounts didn’t always know what kind of creative partner they were going to get.

Understanding that and having the personal wherewithal to contain it while getting the best from the golden geese, used to be the talent that formed the bulk of the ad agency account handler’s job.

Such challenges created incredible account handlers, great operators with people management skills on a par with Hollywood producers.

In fact, the creative/account handler relationship was a time-honored dynamic that pre-existed advertising, going all the way back to the original showmen and theatrical/movie producers and artists.

Talent was talent, a byword for idiosyncrasy, and managing it – however difficult - was the job.

Damnably, more often than not, the more brilliant the talent, the more difficult it was and is to handle. 

But then, if finding, mining and refining diamonds was easy everyone would be doing it.

This reality is something that every single creative industry understood and continues to understand.

Every one, that is, except advertising.

Instead of protecting its unique position as the independent creative force and source for marketers, Madison Avenue (for want of a better collective phrase) shifted culturally ever closer to its clients under the perfectly reasonable guise of partnership.

Perfectly reasonable.

Two words as innocently correct as you could ever hope to find.

And sheer deadly poison to creativity.

Few have ever summed up the creative task of engaging people more succinctly and accurately than town fire chief CD Bales in the 1987 Steve Martin vehicle, Roxanne.

CD is going to write a love letter to Roxanne on behalf of the hopelessly illiterate and love-struck Chris. As he considers the letter, CD says:

“… for Roxanne you need something startling... something so strange it would make her incapable of being reasonable.”

Replace ‘Roxanne’ and ‘her’ with ‘prospective customers’ and ‘them’ and you’ve defined the marketer’s challenge, the creative act at the center of all salesmanship.

It’s something as old as the mating ritual itself, entirely to do with addressing the heart and knowing that the mind will follow.

It’s impossible to say which came first: the realization among Mad Ave management that brilliant creative people were too scarce, too temperamental and too expensive for comfort; or the fear of other parties such as management consultants making more headway with senior clients via the 'perfectly reasonable' route of professionalism, partnership and MBA-based expertise.

Ironically, it was one of the world’s foremost creative ad agency networks that sat at the center of Mad Ave’s problem: Saatchi&Saatchi. 

By the late 1980s/early 1990s, this London-based agency powerhouse had become so successful that they even eyed the takeover of a clearing bank! (A suicidal move as it turned out.)

Mad Ave was envious of the Saatchi model's business success and strove to copy it. But the Saatchi model was a schizophrenic masterpiece: less creatively-driven but highly profitable clients like P&G were kept unwaveringly separate from the creative side of the network (something nobody has come close to emulating as successfully).

The coming of the digital era was the other shoe dropping for Mad Ave. It convinced agencies that ‘businessification’ was indeed the correct course: creativity, Mad Ave decided, was a flimsy offering in the face of Big Data.

Though the belief that knowing everything you can possibly know about someone, including where they’ll be at any given moment = sales, may be workable in limited circumstances, I can't see CD Bales telling Chris that he doesn’t need exceptional courtship skills to make Roxanne fall in love with him, he just needs to know every detail about her, her every desire, and always turn up wherever she is. I think they call that stalking.

An increase in adblocker adoption to 600 million devices globally last year (according to PageFair), represents a 30% annual increase – with an even bigger increase forecast for 2018: People, while not necessarily feeling stalked, are clearly feeling annoyed enough to take steps to avoid online advertising.

Increasing numbers of marketing thinkers are detecting the same old-school sales/marketing thinking that led to the nation’s physical postboxes being crammed with mostly unwelcome sales and marketing ‘literature’.

Is this really the optimal use of the most important and marvelous communications development in history?

The science of Big Data and its brilliant analysis is one (essential) thing, the art of creating desire is quite another.

One requires perfect reason, the other the rare ability to engage the heart, to supersede reason with want – an increasingly essential ability in a sea of sameness swarming with me-too products and even me-tooer advertising.

The latter art has absolute zero to do with age, ethnicity, sex - or so-called digital nativity.

It’s an art that once powered Mad Ave, but has now been almost entirely repudiated (other than via lip-service) in favor of technological know-how.

It’s as if television came into being and became entirely the remit of television manufacturers and repairmen, while writers and directors were considered too tied up in old-fashioned, traditional ideology and typewriters.

You may laugh and scoff but this is precisely the situation in which Mad Ave now finds itself.

The digitally-savvy are legion (and getting more so every day). 

If you’ve visited the Cannes Advertising Festival recently, then you’ll know what a horrible, massively-overpopulated scrum it’s become, the only creative credential required: a laptop.

Marketers, embroiled in the most complex and challenging war in history need a little more than young people with laptops (you know, the folks who proudly brought you the Pepsi spot ‘starring’ Kendall Jenner.)

No, marketers need precisely the creative brilliance that’s been roundly culled from Mad Ave in favor of the above. And they’ve never ever needed it more.

Time For The Ad Agency CEO To Go?

Have you ever checked the ratio of firings among Mad. Ave CCOs and CEOs?

It’s around 10 to one.

Which is odd, because doesn't corporate success rely on partnership and collaboration? And shouldn't that should float (or sink) all boats.

Apparently not on ‘the Ave’.

Unless, of course, there was no partnership in the first place and the CEO was the actual boss, the CCO (and CSO etc) just an employee.

Thus the business issues of the agency were the serious, important things, while the agency’s output/product was of secondary importance at best.

Ad agency CEOs tend to be remarkable individuals* with high charisma and people-skills.

It’s easy to see why clients often come to regard the CEO as the key representative of the agency, a personal friend even.

Though, as far as the client’s business is concerned, the agency’s only actual value lies in its output.

There are two main routes that networks go to deliver that output.

They hire stellar people to create and deliver stellar work.

Or they hire a CEO who then hires the people of his (still usually a him, I'm afraid) choice.

These days, the latter approach is the runaway favorite.

Problem with the former approach, is that it risks making the agency idea-centric (like the NFL is football-centric, or Hersheys chocolate-centric lol).

Why 'problem'? Because, for many CEOs, idea-centricity forces the ad agency to be a partnership where there's a danger that the creative work is the clients' reason for being there and NOT the would-be all-powerful CEO. These CEOs didn't put in all that work/sell their souls to the Devil to be anything less than all-powerful!

In the best creative agencies (few and far between as they are), the senior partners at the agency start the agency or arrive together as partners from day one.

In the less successful creative agencies, the CEO tends to be hired first and put in charge, the rest of the ‘team’ to be put together at his (still a him) pleasure.

Copious evidence reveals that, when ad agency CEOs bring in people of their choice, the de facto starting point for these people is as subordinates.

A CEO's choice tends also to prioritize character over ability. Needless to say character priority #1 is being reasonable - as good a guarantee as you'll get that creative excellence will never be fought for.

Wrong. Nothing should ever be prioritized over ability - nothing. After all, that's what clients pay the big bucks for. 

Stellar ability and the power it draws are problematic in an agency where the CEO believes the top-dog spot is already taken. 

Thus what seems to result in 99% of agencies is a kind of 'talent-search-as-self-serving-corporate-engineering' to ensure that nobody's reputation/ability surpasses that of the CEO.

Inevitably this results in less-than-optimal product/output. 

When less-than-stellar hirings inevitably fail, they can be let go with little attendant fuss. Meanwhile, the CEO can bemoan the riotous, faster-than-ever-moving world he (yup, still a he for the most part) and his clients are battling together/declare how tough it is to get it right/trumpet his excitement at the new search.

Pure common sense should dictate that, while normal in most industries, the traditional-CEO-figure model doesn't work properly in companies whose output is creativity and strategy: nobody in the company should know strategy better than the CSO or creativity than the CCO, thus nobody else should have final say over agency output.

What these agency leaders need is a real partner - a COO (chief operating officer) perhaps, to ensure that vital process and operations - like those to do with actually getting paid - are as robust as can be.

These three – CCO, CSO, COO – should be equal partners in the same way as were, say, Larry, Sergei and Eric Schmidt; ie. with a clear understanding of who creates and curates the actual product/output.

Ad agencies first began to get in trouble when they shifted from being ideation companies - which, if you think about it, could arguably have ended up as Googles themselves one day - to being service (or should that be servile) companies. 

Imagine if, instead of the genius of Larry and Sergei, Google had've been launched by an all-powerful CEO with people under him most notable for their character, personability and easygoingness? 

I’m all for people-skills, charm and charisma. But only when these valuable attributes are 100% in service of the work. Then what you get is a culture of respect, not vacuous likeability.

When charm and niceness – even to a certain extent, efficiency – become the pillars of an ad agency, then the agency truly has become a commodity.

New business pitches are aptly called beauty contests, with so-called ‘chemistry sessions’ forming a – if not the – critical selection criterion.

Instead of work/output/product/creative excellence leading (in my first pitch in the US, the client team left behind one of their scoring sheets - creativity was ranked seventh out of 10 agency requirements in importance), pitches are all about salesmanship and presentation skills.

All in all, it’s a highly complex, chicken-egg situation. What came first, the need of a charismatic CEO because of bad work, or a dearth of great work because of CEOs' self-serving missions? My answer: you can always get great work if you want it badly enough.

Truly effective leaders in every field share one essential quality: the desire to be the dumbest person in the room.

To ensure that, they of course surround themselves with the very best people. 

When the CEO is the most exciting thing about an agency, the big figure, the Go-to Guy, the Big Kahuna, Da Maaan, it’s either because he (Da Maaaan is still a man) hasn't found any brilliant people, or because he has no intention of doing so.

* Usually men I'm afraid...