Ad agencies don't need a CEO

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.

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...

"Everybody is creative" - The Big Lie That's Killing Mad Ave.

Overheard at a Mad Ave function the other day:

"I'm sorry but I HATE the word 'creatives' - as if it's something reserved for the anointed few. At our agency we believe everybody is creative."

Three words that creatives come across a lot these days.

A passable sentiment in a toddlers' art class, perhaps; in a professional setting it isn't just deeply insulting but plain wrong.

Yes, everyone has the capacity for creativity. 

Just as everyone has the capacity to sing.

But while few of us would compare our efforts in the shower to Adele, it seems that in the field of creative advertising everybody is Adele.

Imagine anybody in any other occupation getting away with such a thing:

"We've completely changed out the chef and staff. They were getting so precious about every little detail. I mean it's just food. It all ends up in the same place, right?"

"No, he isn't a qualified surgeon, but he has real healing powers. Ok, relax: here comes the general anesthetic..."

"Steven Spielberg was asking for too much money so we got Steven Spilkus."

Ludicrous, right?

Not as far as marketing services are concerned, it seems.

I'm not alone in believing that the "everybody's creative" refrain gets you the Kendall Jenner Pepsi spot.

Or that it gets you that nice, personable young bureaucrat as your 'creative director' (you can tell (s)he's creative because (s)he wears jeans and a tee shirt in the office) and the umpteenth anodyne campaign featuring a car driving along a road to music; or two homemakers in a kitchen discussing the finer points of their bleach/detergent/vacuum cleaner by name; or people eating/chewing/drinking something cool and everything around them frosting up; or young people jumping about to music and close-ups of sneakers/clothes/cellphones/candy; or middle-aged people talking to camera about computers/insurance/banking/pensions/healthcare; or beer/trucks/restaurants described by Sam Elliott.

And so on and on ad f*cking infinitum.

The "everybody's creative" refrain has also led directly to the canning of the genuinely creative folks - such a huge, critical problem in a Mad Ave in apparent meltdown, that I and many, many others are stunned it isn't THE conversation in the ad industry right now.

Nothing - digitization, automation, Big Data, blockchain - nothing matters, no delivery system is worth a damn if what's being delivered stinks.

Everybody is absolutely NOT creative in any sense that helps brands, products and services become and/or remain famous.

In fact very, very, very few people are creative in that true sense. And the bigger the talent, the rarer it is - and the more expensive. 

Just like it is in every single pursuit and occupation from sports (What? You want Aaron Rodgers to take a pay cut?) to silversmithing.

Every day we read stories about how Mad Ave is failing - none bother to explore the obvious link between this and the dearth/exodus of true creative talent.

Every conversation revolves around the next big thing, none on the critical need to focus on what never changes. (Like Jeff Bezos, whose focus on the old-fangled low prices/fast delivery/vast choice trifecta made him the world's richest man.) 

For some time now, Mad Ave's most senior executives have got away with the "everybody's creative" lunacy. It has allowed them to take millions upon millions of dollars-worth of so-called top creatives off their payrolls and, with nobody to stand up for quality - i.e. "This Kendall Jenner spot blows, bring me a good idea" - countless time and angst off the creative process. 

The niceness of your agency's staff, the brilliance of your strategists, the newest new technology, the sharpness of your tailoring/dentistry, the exclusivity of your country club - none of this matters if the work is poor.

Superb strategy is meaningless without executional excellence. It's hot air, fog. It's big talk. It's Mike Tyson's catchphrase:

"Everybody has a strategy until they get hit in the face."

Continued exciting advances in digital technology gave the digerati and their followers first-mover advantage. This always happens at the start of every social revolution. And, as throughout human history, the 'new' is rapidly ingested by all until it's nothing but the norm.

While the digerati ruled, the creatives, the poets, and everything else that's been around forever because it works, was deemed run-of-the-mill, or better yet 'traditional'.

'Traditional' stuff like creativity being pushed to the bottom of the totem pole makes it seem accessible by all. Hence smart young people, clever with laptops, became the new creatives.

Easy to see how tiny a hop it is from there to "everybody's creative."

But all science and no poetry makes the world a dull place: driving home the other day listening to sports talk ESPN on 98.7 FM, former Steelers and Jets lineman Willie Colón set to discuss the Jets' quarterback problem, suddenly piped up out of the blue with:

"By the way, we watch a lot of tv in the holidays. What happened to the advertising? When did it get so boring? What happened to stuff like 'Wassuuup?' and "Where's the beef?' I had about 50 over for Christmas and everybody agreed how bad today's ads are."

Everybody is NOT creative in any way that is commercially viable - unless quality is merely a nice-to-have. 

At their very best, advertising creatives are artists and poets and showpeople with a commercial edge who engage people's feelings and make brands and products famous.

Here's how one of America's greatest ever poets, ee cummings, put it on accepting the Academy of American Poets annual fellowship in 1949:

"A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.

This may sound easy. It isn't.

A lot of people think or believe or know they feel - but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling - not knowing or believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or believe or know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.

To be nobody-but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time - and whenever we do it, we're not poets."

Every senior ad agency business leader will experience a spike of familiar dread on reading cummings' fighting talk.

Ideas like 'fighting' and 'battling' and 'hard work' will spark the muscle memory, past confrontations with dedicated creatives refusing to compromise their work and suggesting instead that account handlers work to honor their clients and make them understand how much worse and less effective the work will be if the clients' whims are unquestioningly acted upon.

Creatives who have made extraordinary leaps from brief to idea believe that their account handler colleagues should make similarly extraordinary leaps in 'selling' the work to clients.

Thank goodness, thinks the modern account handler, that the world has moved beyond this exhausting 'traditional' dynamic. Thank goodness we're in charge. Goodbye the old 'creative bottleneck', hello frictionless digital. 

No surprise then that the majority of advertising entails little/nothing more than getting the marketing strategy on film: it's the logical conclusion to the "everybody's creative" philosophy.

Obviously this necessitates Mad Ave fees getting slashed: if "everybody's creative" then why pay a premium to an ad agency?

Which is just one tiny, frictionless step from doing away with ad agencies altogether.