Ad Agency Vibes

If I was a young creative I would be gagging to go into an office

The chat over the last few weeks has been whether ad agencies should force their staff to work in the office or not. WPP say yes. Omnicom say no. Google say yes, 5 days a week with at least 60 hours. I have no particular horse in this race. I run a small studio. I don’t work for an agency. I don’t particularly like WPP. I get that much of Mark Read’s back to the office mandate is financially motivated but it can be true at the same time that it’s also better for creatives to be in a building rather than trapped in a zombie zoom review.

Working in a buzzing ad agency is brilliant.

My first experience of that was as a placement team at DMB&B in Victoria, London. Every creative team had an office. Even the placement teams. We were next to the pool table and beer fridge. Every lunchtime most of the creative dept would play pool. That was where you learned what was going on. Who was getting briefed on what, when the big meetings were and so on. I learned the actual craft by walking into people’s offices to see what was on the walls. Of course back then things were on walls not on screens. It was easier to get a snapshot of something by looking at a creative’s wall, or something might catch your eye. We’d all put up stuff that we thought should have run. Walls of hope. Of manifestation.

I have fond memories of that placement office. I puked in the corner and fell asleep under my desk after the Christmas Party.

My first actual real proper paying job was at a bad agency but a great location. Right next to the White Horse on Newburgh Street in Soho. You’d get a lot of ad people in there. I watched Arsenal lose to Man United in the FA Cup Semi Final. I nearly got my head kicked in for saying something disparaging about Roy Keane.

I was not a big boozer. I’d rather go for a walk. Clothes shops, record shops, art galleries. Book shops. STUFF. You need to appreciate stuff to be good at your job. I needed feeding. I still do. Even now I’d rather go into town than stay at home because I want to see the ads on the tube. What people are wearing, what books they are reading. If your job is to sell things to people it helps to see them in the wild.

I got better at my job because of all these things. The chat. The walks. The vibes. Soho was great. I did a screenwriting course at Raindance just round the corner in Soho. That is paying off even now as I’m in talks with a US Producer about a script I wrote that takes place over an ultra marathon.

Point is, none of that happens if I stay at home. Of course I’m writing this from home in my cosy side office that has enough space for a little desk and my record collection. I’m currently listening to Chet Baker. It’s raining. Chet Baker is not particularly cool, I could lie and say I’m listening to the obscure Japanese Student Jazz record Graydon Gordon talked about on Why Is This Interesting. Or some cool Weatherall tune but the truth is I’m just going through every album I own and it happened to be Chet Baker. Next up is Miles Davis, OK?

I understand that many people took remote jobs because they were…remote. We use an illustrator that lives in a van in Cornwall because he likes to surf. That’s a lifestyle choice and power to him. We used to work with a 3D guy who lived in Innsbruck. He’d churn out crazy quality 3D renders non stop for 3 weeks without sleeping, then disappear for 3 weeks to go skiing or mountain biking. He had a skillset that didn’t require constant connection. In fact it was the reverse. He worked better in a dungeon.

If you were hired as remote and are now being told you have to go in, well you probably joined a shitty organisation or a good organisation that feels it’s the best way to survive. This is where we are right now. There is zero security for anyone at any level in the ad business. And as AI becomes more pervasive connecting as humans: sight, sound, touch, smell (!?) might just become the secret sauce.

I just finished ‘Poor Artists’ by The White Pube. It’s a really interesting blend of fiction and non fiction around what it takes to succeed in the London Art World. The authors talk about the importance of peers at Art College.

“You’ve noticed what the others are doing. They followed the progression of your thinking. You’ve exchanged comments you’ve had lunch together. You’ve complained about something someone said…..You’ve got the bus home together and spoken about your families. It was all learning every second of it the studio provides space in which to enact those other modes of teaching in the form of pay to pay conversation. …I’ve never thought about my friends as forming part of my education. ….There isn’t much in the way of support for artists but a network is certainly one of them. We need to take that seriously and not think of it as a byproduct of being on an art course but as a central tenant of our education community building as a fundamental part of learning and a fundamental part of your adult life to come.”

For everyone in the ad, marketing or comms business physical interaction is essential. But I believe it’s even more vital for creatives. You can interact online of course. You can make a solid argument that culture and ideas live on Tik Tok rather than the streets of downtown New York, Tokyo or Shoreditch. You can make ideas for Tik Tok and that’s fun but is that it? For sure, you get vibes on Tik Tok and sometimes culture defining vibes, but shouldn’t we want to make an impact even larger than that? Did you see the Timothee Chalamet speech? He said he wants to be one of the greats. Good for him. If that means better movies then it’s good for all of us.

Currently I work two days a week at Wildfarmed, a regen farming and food business. I’d happily be in that office four days a week. I like to keep Fridays free for long runs and other non advertising things I do. The vibes are strong in the Wildfarmed office. It feels like a good ad agency. It helps that two of the three founders come from an artistic background. There is loads of stuff on the walls. Work we have done. Things we like. T-shirts, posters. Most lunchtimes people gather on picnic tables to chat. We often get bits of free food. Baked goods from the gods.

The Wildfarmed Office.

We squeeze on at the end of a row of desks, we don’t have permanent seats. We freestyle. When we want to concept we go into the comfy corner or a room. There is a constant flow of interesting people and interesting chats. Last week lots of people had nice clothes on because they were going to Parliament, before that the Godfather of Regen from the US came in. It’s not a posh building by any stretch but the team have done a great job of making it a place people want to spend time in. The tunes are good.

Of course there is a real estate play to some of the WPP chat about going back to the office. There is nothing quite as depressing as an emptying ad agency. When I was at JWT New York we went from five floors to three and then a few years later to one and a half and then, of course, JWT went poof! forever.. But while it was five floors I really liked ‘walking the halls’. I don’t know why, maybe some of it was to try and look busy. (I think I spent most of my two years at JWT playing Words With Friends on my iphone - another post). But I have always walked around, at every agency I have been at. When I was young it was because I wanted to see what the better creatives were doing or get on good briefs. As I got older it was just an innate curiosity. All good creatives are nosey.

Top left. That was me. Ballin’.

I don’t have a preference for offices vs open layouts for the creative process. I had the sickest office in the world at Saatchi NY. It was the corner office overlooking the Hudson River on the top floor, next to Gerry Graf, the CCO, Mary Baglivo the CEO and James Orsini the CFO. It was a total 80’s coke den with black leather sofas and mirrored tables. It was big enough to fit a ping pong table in. So I did that. A very nice ping pong table made by my friend Ryan, that went viral on tumblr. Tumblr was instagram before instagram.

I didn’t have any idea of the importance of ‘The Corner Office’. The status. I was this naive English ‘digital’ kid. But I still walked around Saatchi a lot. One of the other corner offices was habited by Chris Beresford-Hill now the big daddy at BBDO. I’d pop in for a chat. He was nice. But there were loads of other cool people, always doing interesting things. Gerry hired cool interesting teams, who, to a person, quit immediately after he set up his own place. But, and this should not be underestimated either, I made a load of really good friends at Saatchi that I still talk to all the time and many of which I 4see IN REAL LIFE. Shout out Kwame, Lisa, Jason, Kevin, John.

This was early on but there are already things on the wall. Scripts etc.

All the creatives had offices but we did great work because Gerry was a great CCO. He’s the only boss I was ever actually scared to present to. He would have gotten great work out of us if we had been in a warehouse in Brooklyn or working on a boat, rather than an 80’s relic in the middle of nowhere by the West Side Highway. Would he have got great work out of us if we had been remote? Maybe, we’ll never really know. But my hunch is no. I don’t think you get the nuance online. Gerry’s reviews were very nuanced. He’d often think of something later and come into your office to chat about it. That doesn’t happen online. Once I was in his office taking about football / soccer and made the comment that the US was not a real World Cup side because they didn’t have a World Cup Song. Gerry immediately said, ‘Well let’s make one then.’ And so we did (I say we, it was really him, he wrote and recorded the thing in two days). Again - that stuff, OK, it was a bit stupid, but creatives should feel free to do stupid things and I don’t think that happens if we are not in the same room.

Gerry was very attuned to picking up very small things. We were on a shoot for JC Penney and I pulled a tiny little, barely noticeable, face about something that the director said. Now, bare in mind Gerry is basically the best TV writer in the world, and I’m not, but he picked up on it and asked me what I was thinking. It was a small gesture but it meant everything to me.

The Dare Creative Dept was in a basement. It was tight. In every way.

Maybe offices for creatives were a hangover from a bygone era. I don’t think any of the digital agencies ever had offices. At Dare everyone had the same size desk. Whether that was Flo and I running the creative department, Mark Collier the founder, or a junior designer knocking out banners. Perhaps the lack of an office was a shock for Mark coming from being MD at BBH but if it was, he never let on. And there were very few quiet spaces to think. Flo and I would go to Frank’s Cafe if we needed to crack something. Dare was Agency of the Year three years in a row and Digital Agency of the Decade, so we must have been doing something right. There was definitely a spirit, comradery. A feeling that we were all in together. Pitching, big meetings, awards shows! There was a vibe. And it was exciting. I’m sure there are some really good Zoom calls but nothing beats being in a building that’s got it going on.

So while there is understandably a lot of focus on the WPP back to the office mandate, brought into even sharper focus as they hemorrhage cash, clients and headcount, the notion of the importance of creative people being together should not be thrown out with that clusterfuck. It’s incumbent on smaller agencies to make their offices an amazing place to hang out. That’s not about free food and gyms. I did two stints at Google Creative Lab. One in 2013 where there was a great vibe. All those Chrome Experiments, all those awards, all that hope, all that money! Stuff on the walls everywhere. And then a brief second spell in 2019. Same free food. In fact the food was even better and the gyms were really fucking nice but the vibe had turned toxic. IYKYK.

Any successful agency needs young people buzzing around the building. They have to see a path to success. They need to actually physically see other people who are great at their job. How do they present? How do they interact with other people? Most of that is very hard to teach. You learn through osmosis.

So by all means laugh at the state Mark Read has got himself into at WPP, but if you want to build the agency of the future I’d suggest making it a place that everyone wants to be present at all the time.

Apart from Fridays.