What agencies are for.
And why forgetting it is a problem.
The foundational purpose for an ad agency is to disagree with Brian Eno.
I mean, not exactly, but stick with me for a minute.
One of the many things Eno is famous for, is the concept of “scenius”, which is effectively the idea of the collective genius of a (social or creative or professional) scene. Think of it as the inverse of the “great man theory” of history. Rather than humanity being moved forward by heroic figures who are uniquely gifted (intellectually, creatively, strategically, rhetorically, take your pick), scenius points to the unique alchemy of certain places at certain times, where the right people influence, inform, and challenge each other, and amazing things happen. So: Art in Paris in the 20s, the birth of modern computing in Silicon Valley, or (to be really Canadian about it) the 1970s Toronto comedy scene that included the young versions of John Candy, Dan Aykroyd, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Gilda Radner and somehow, more.
Layered into the concept of scenius is the idea that it’s naturally occurring, and that you cannot force it to happen. Scenius is, at surface level, a more democratic sounding concept than a lone genius, but it’s just as random and elusive. It comes down to the idea of a moment, a group, and a place and a crew being the apex of achievement, rather than the gifted individual.
Engineering this is, of course, what nearly every single ad agency in history has tried to do, in terms of writing, visual art, film, digital, experiences, etc. To build a community, a team, and a culture that has a higher-than-normal frequency of genius moments. It’s a Frankenstein kind of thing; we know what genius feels like, we have experienced it close up a couple times, and now we’re going to re-create it from spare parts, lightning, and hubris.
The vast majority of agencies are really just a very small but incredibly talented group of people, at their origin. As agencies grow, and inevitably realize they can’t scale the attention of a few individuals, they try to systematize that thinking, process, and creativity, recruit others of the same (or better) talent, and try to build a machine that can reliably generate those moments of genius.
The goal is to create the right mix of skills, process and culture to create better-than-reasonably-expected outcomes. The difference between this and ‘traditional’ scenius is both the external direction and external competition.
By external direction, I mean the reality that clients, market dynamics, and business realities shape what we’re doing. We solve the problems we get paid to solve (often by solving related but distinctly different problems), and we often create things based on pre-existing boxes we can put them in.
By external competition, I mean that beyond internal agency cultures that have a healthy sense of creative competition, the ad industry is also always in competition and conversation with different versions of the itself; other ad agencies, working on other brands, in the same marketplace. When you see two ads for competing delivery app brands that look similar, that’s two groups of people in two completely unrelated agencies trying to crack a novel and meaningful human statement about the joy of laziness convenience. And those people really, really want to win, partially because that’s the job, and partially because being outdone by someone in the same scene is motivating, if you’re doing it right. Our “scenes” are larger than ourselves, but we’re still trying to build something distinct and separate that does what the larger whole can.
This isn’t exactly a shocking thing to say, I know. “Ad agencies are trying very hard to do exceptional work” isn’t a stunning thesis. But I think it’s important, because not acknowledging this is why advertising can be so disappointing right now.
If you should be building a machine for genius, but instead you’re working towards a machine for efficiency or personalization or surveillance… you’ve missed the core part of why an (external) agency adds value, in my opinion. You haven’t bothered to check if you’re solving the right problem, rather than the one your boss (client, holding company CEO, or shareholder) has asked you to solve.
In the first of this series, I said that the point of advertising is to give things meaning, sometimes beyond their functional value.
In the second, I said that the job of strategy was to see things (problems, truths, opportunities) that most people don’t, and communicate them to other people in a useful way.
Today I’m saying the point of an agency is to create the conditions for repeated moments of (creative) genius. To build and maintain a machine for genius.
That’s the value our industry used to sell - the idea that building a machine like this of your own was a very tall order, because 1) it requires a culture that would be incredibly difficult to maintain inside an existing corporation, 2) the people that fit well into agency structures may not want to work within a traditional corporate culture, and 3) this kind of machine requires divergent thinking bordering on dissent. So you had an agency, because getting people to care about something, during an intentional interruption of the stuff they actually want or need to do, is kinda hard and kinda important. This has changed in recent years, though. Not only do people think they don’t need an external agency to get to good work, they may not even need a human to create infinite versions of targeted work.
When you read about the legendary agencies or campaigns of the 20th century, you never have the thought “Why didn’t that big company bring this in house?”. As the industry takes a moment to mourn DDB, we might remember that it’s unlikely anyone in-house at Volkswagen would have recommended calling the beetle a “lemon”. That came from an outsider perspective, by necessity.
The pursuit of a more corporate, more polished, more efficient and more predictably measurable industry is in many ways the exact opposite of pursuit of moments of creative genius, rooted in unexpected ideas, with a focus on building meaning around brands or products.
To be clear, I’m not saying this shouldn’t be a business. I think ad agencies need to be MORE aware of how they actually make money and what value they offer, and stop hiding behind attribution models that can trace their lineage back to a mission of “try to divert budget from TV to search ads”, or vague but passionate pronouncements about creativity.
Our industry went from building machines for genius, to pursuing the most efficient ads possible. Which might be why some of the biggest companies in the world are funded nearly entirely by advertising, and betting their futures on getting further into advertising, but the prevailing narrative is that the people working in advertising are doomed, and the average person considers advertising a pox on their existence.
There’s an opportunity to do a lot better. It begins with remembering what all this is for.