The Musings Of An Opinionated Sod [Help Me Grow!]

1. The benefit of independence.

2. You can tell a company by how many slices of pizza they want to eat.

I should point out I’ve worked for holding companies in the past.

I may well work for one in the future …

And while my experience with them has been generally good, my experience at independent companies was better.

More emphasis on the work.
More emphasis on the culture of work.
Less fear that you are going to be fired to hit a shareholder dividend.

Now this doesn’t mean holding company agencies can’t make great work or be great places to work.

There’s some amazing examples around the World of just that.

Agencies that I genuinely regard as some of the best in the business.

Standing shoulder to shoulder with the usual suspects [read: Wieden] with a history that is equally as long.

If not longer.

But it’s fair to say, they tend to be the exception rather than the rule … often used as the shiny ‘jewel in the network’ crown to attract big business, rather than a role-model for how the rest of the network should behave.

Again, being part of a network does not immediately mean it’s bad.

There’s a hell of a lot of brilliant people I know who are working in them for a start, which means they have a level of talent in the organisation that would be the envy of any agency.

Plus there’s a whole host of different types of network, so to tar them all with the same brush would be wrong.

But the reality is there’s some who just don’t give a fuck about the industry they’re in.

Of course, they will never admit that, but for all their claims about caring about creativity, they care far more about profit.

I get it.

Money is important.

It keeps tens of thousands of people employed.

But the reality is if they could make more money selling carpet cleaner, they would.

Which explains why they sold the value of creativity down the river in favour of process, scale, convenience and whatever buzz-term is fashionable with the big corporations they covet at any given time.

And this is where the title of this post comes in.

Recently Martin Scorsese was asked about his film making.

Change the word ‘films’ for ‘advertising’ and you have a pretty good overview of how a lot of modern adland operates.

You can make great work.

But it’s way, way harder than it should be.

Because too often, the focus isn’t on the quality of creativity, but the quantity of cash.