Field Notes
Sweathead, a global community of strategists and marketers, asked if I could give a talk on the truths and urgent problems of working in the advertising industry. The event, Advertising, We Need to Talk was held online on August 28th.
When you're presenting in person, you get immediate feedback from observing the body language of the audience. If you notice people nodding off, you can switch gears and condense points that are not working with the crowd.
This sort of feedback isn’t easily available when speaking online. It feels a little like a one-way mirror, where the audience can see you but you can't see who they are, what they're thinking, or how they are responding.
The magic of conferences and industry events are the moments between sessions, where you can connect with the other speakers over lunch or coffee, and get to hear from the participants on their perspective of what you shared.
There are really smart people who are trying to figure this out. How to connect people virtually in a more meaningful way. I can't wait to see what happens next.
Here are the slides and notes from the talk. It was designed for strategists and marketers in advertising, but it probably applies to most people in the creative business.
Introduction
You might have noticed something changing over the past decade. More and more talented people are leaving the agency world.
This was already happening way before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the past 18 months, you see people rethinking what’s most important and essential to them, but it actually started many years ago.
They are leaving to start their own shops, to become content creators, to build communities of like-minded people, to have a direct relationship with followers around the world or to be independent creatives living and working as nomads.
I’m Felix Ng, co-founder of Anonymous.
Today I’m going to talk about why the most talented people in the world don’t want to work for agencies anymore, and what we can do about it.
There are about 12 reasons I’ve observed, but we only have 8 minutess so we’ll focus on 3.
They want more Flexibility, Meaning and Control.
Flexibility
They want to work for themselves, on their own terms, from anywhere.
It used to be that the only way to be successful was that you went to school, got good grades, found a good job, worked hard, moved up the corporate ladder, won awards, got promoted, and got more benefits.
This used to be the only way. But things have changed.
Today, you just need a laptop, an internet connection and you can work from anywhere and connect with a world of like-minded individuals.
Meaning
Agencies are still selling things, instead of making better things.
There’s a book written by Seth Godin 20 years ago called Permission Marketing. The premise is simple: instead of disrupting people with advertising, be so good that they give you the permission to market to them.
Unfortunately, even 20 years later, advertising still works by disruption. The methods have gotten more covert, often wrapped as content and stories, but they are still the same.
We are still in the business of persuasion, instead of making better things that people want or need.
More and more people in agencies know this. They know that the audience knows this. But because of how our business relationships with clients are structured, we have created a story in our professional ghetto that what we do is essential and helps make our client’s products better. But it doesn’t.
Control
There’s an old joke that the smartest kids from art school go to work in advertising and the hardworking ones go on to become designers. If that’s true, the smart ones are now going into tech, startups and in-house because that’s where the money and control is.
More and more people in marketing and advertising are starting to realise how limiting most of our work is. Even when we don’t think there’s anything unique or intrinsically useful about the product we are hired to sell, we still have to because it’s our job.
And this used to work. You used to be able to control the narrative and customer journey. But it no longer applies. Before we buy a product, we ask our friends for their opinion, we read reviews and we do product comparisons online.
Deep down, we all want to feel useful in the work we do. And over the past decade, the value has shifted. It has moved from selling to building. The closer you get to the product, the more control you have in the work you do.
So all these makes building a team today (and in the future) really really difficult.
So what can we do about it? Without talents, how do we make the best work possible?
Instead of competing with others, we can collaborate with them instead.
Depending on what each project requires, we (at Anonymous) build teams with talents from all over the world — made up of independent marketing and creative individuals, advertising agencies, design studios. researchers, illustrators, artists, etc.
We used to call it the Avengers model (curating the best talents to work on a project), but it’s more like a Lego system (building a team of teams depending on what the project needs).
This way, you still get to work with the most talented people in the world, instead of competing with them.
We’ve been on both sides of the table. Writing and receiving briefs.
There’s always a question of how you get the best work from people. The answer I have come to realise is extremely simple.
Hire the right people and stay out of their way.
When you hire someone, you might feel a need to manage them and direct their work. This is silly. The reason we should hire someone is because they are able to do something better than we can. That is the goal for any business owner, entrepreneur, or employer. To hire people who are better than you. You don’t hire a photographer and direct the photographer on how to take a photo. You hire a photographer because you think their work is suitable for you, and because they are better at taking a picture than you are. You hire them because you trust them to perform a quality service that they have delivered before and to provide that value for you.
And something happens when you give up control.
The benchmark for the project shifts from you to the other person. That person now feels a need to deliver value at a level that is higher than what you could have imagined because they now have ownership and are personally invested into the outcome of the assignment. They feel responsible for its success. Their names are attached to it. They are doing it because they want to do it as well as possible. And not as well as you want it to be. The excuse “my boss / client wanted it this way” no longer applies. They no longer have that to fall back on.
Instead of building a marketing plan around a product. Build marketing into the product.
Instead of spending money buying media that disrupts people or running social media campaigns telling people they stand to win a prize if they tag their friends or share the post, invest it into research and development of better products for your customers.
If you make something people love, they will naturally want to share it.
What’s not going to change
We have an obsession at finding what's new, what's next, and figuring out how to get there before others. And we're always asking what's going to change, in the future? And everyone is a pundit when it’s about what’s going to happen next.
There’s always something new that promises to change everything. Blockchain, NFTs, Metaverse, AI,.etc.
To be honest, I can barely keep up.
So instead I try to think about what's NOT going to change.
What’s not going to change is… In the future, people will want more flexibility, meaning and control. Not less.
Building a team in the future will not become easier, it will be harder and harder.
It’s no longer about how we build our company, our positioning, free lunches, more days off or flexible work from home arrangements.
It’s time to rethink our entire belief system in what we do, why people should care, and how we can make better things instead of finding better ways to sell things people don’t need.
How to Make a Product People Love
So for the exercise, I'll share a few things we’ve learned from building products for you to think about and possibly apply to whatever it is you are working on.
You can use a brief you're working on now, or even a new business idea you have and test out these principles.
The exercise is “How to make a product that people love”.
First, to establish a baseline, let's look at a really simple observation of any successful product or service.
You might already be familiar with this statement. It is why marketing works. Every person has two selves. The person they are and the person they want to be. Marketing makes the promise that a product or service can help you become the person you want to be.
So our baseline is, if you want to make something that people want or need, it should be something that helps them become the person they want to be.
But the challenge is a lot of briefs we get from clients don't allow us to change or improve the product.
So instead of thinking of ways to sell products that promise to help us become the person we want to be, actually make that product.
The first step to making a product people love is quite obvious. Find out what people want or need that no one is making (yet).
Alternatively, what is a feature or benefit that is missing in your client’s product or service that you know their customers will love?
Of course this can be challenging when our scope of work and brief is already written by the client. We are expected to stick to our “marketing lane” and to market the product as is.
This is an opportunity for us to challenge the brief, by reframing the opportunity or challenge, based on the research of what cultural tension there is at the moment, what need is unmet that the client can create products for.
Every entrepreneur in the world becomes an entrepreneur because they see what others don’t. We can become better marketers by being more entrepreneurial and observing what people want or need that no one is making yet.
Second, if it’s important, make it interesting. And if it’s interesting, make it important.
For eg: few non-creatives would want to read a book or attend a conference on advertising, but most are happy to watch a film on it (because film feels like entertainment).
The sweet spot is between the two.
Another example is climate change. We know that climate change is real, and see it in the news every day about how it is affecting the world around us. But few of us are willing to dive deep into learning more about it because, even though it is important, we don’t see an urgency to it yet, or we don’t feel like there’s much we can do about it. If we want people to know more and take action, we need to make it interesting and easy for people to do something about it.
And if it’s something interesting and cool, flip the question around the other way. How do we make it important for people to care?
We live in a time of abundance. There’s almost nothing that we want that we can’t find easily.
You can watch hundreds of movies and tv shows at a low price of $15 a month. All the music in the world for less at $10 a month. You can learn anything at no cost on YouTube. (Well, you just need to give 15 secs of your life watching an ad).
So very few things are truly scarce these days (with the exception of vaccines and a healthy planet).
What’s rare is scarce. What’s in demand is valuable.
If you want to make something that people will love, value and demand, build a scarcity effect into your product. I’m not suggesting that you lie about it. If you made 10,000 copies of your book, don’t say that there’s only 10 copies to create a false demand.
Instead you can create different tiers for your product. 100 copies of a book beautifully printed. At $100. And unlimited digital copies at a lower price.
With that, you create a demand for the printed book, and also make failing impossible because you’ve set the bar low with a smaller print run.
And over time, as more and more people are interested in your product, slowly increase the supply of it, but always have it below the demand there is so there is scarcity built into it.
Hope this has been useful. And not too much of a rant.
This presentation is a ‘too long, didn’t read’ version of a series of blog posts I wrote on our website under Field Notes.
Thank you again!
P.S.: Preparing for this talk inspired me to start tweeting again to practice writing shorter observations. We used to be more active on Instagram, but it’s become more of a shopping network.
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Felix Ng
Co-founder, Anonymous
@felix.anonymous