Thoughts

I like dogs.

Let’s get that out of the way.

Dogs in agency offices are great. They wander into meetings, sleep under desks and generally contribute more to morale than most employee engagement initiatives.

But please stop putting them on the team page.

You know the one.

Dave
Head of Strategy

Sarah
Creative Director

Colin
Head of Barketing

It was probably funny the first time somebody did it.

Now it’s become part of the agency starter pack.

And whatever you do, don’t create an Instagram account for the dog.

Seriously.

Don’t do that.

The agency starter pack

The dog isn’t alone.

There’s the games console nobody has switched on since the office move.

The pool table that’s mostly used to store boxes.

The exposed brick.

The exposed air conditioning.

The exposed everything, because apparently ceilings aren’t creative.

There’s the beer fridge, the neon sign and the enormous communal table where everybody can listen to everybody else’s Teams calls.

There are retro toys carefully arranged on shelves.

An old Game Boy.

A boxed Star Wars figure.

Maybe some vinyl toys.

There’s an expensive coffee machine and locally roasted coffee.

There are branded hoodies.

There are meeting rooms named after musicians rather than numbered in a way that might help somebody find them.

There’s a wall covered in Post-it notes to demonstrate that strategy has recently occurred.

And, somewhere, there is probably a PlayStation.

Nobody knows where the controllers are.

We pay in pizza

Then there are the cultural benefits.

Friday beers.

Free fruit.

Pizza.

Especially pizza.

“We need everyone to stay until ten tonight, but we’ll get some pizzas in.”

Agency overtime has historically had an astonishingly favourable exchange rate with Domino’s.

There’s the away day.

Go-karting.

Escape rooms.

Axe throwing.

Mandatory activities designed to demonstrate how spontaneous everybody is.

And, of course:

We work hard and play hard.

Which has traditionally meant you’ll be working late.

We’re brave

Agency websites have their own starter pack.

We’re brave.

We’re curious.

We’re fiercely independent.

We partner with ambitious brands.

We create meaningful experiences.

We combine strategy, creativity and technology.

We solve problems.

We challenge conventions.

We do things differently.

Then we build:

Home / Work / Services / About / Culture / Contact

Agencies particularly like brave.

Brave clients.

Brave ideas.

Brave thinking.

Brave work.

Then we all build the same website.

Nothing says “we’re different” quite like doing exactly the same quirky thing as everybody else.

Culture has its own page

Culture is important enough to get a navigation item.

Click it and you’ll find:

The dog.

The away day.

The Christmas party.

The office.

People drinking.

Someone DJing.

The charity event.

The Pride photo.

The pool table.

The values.

Possibly the pizza.

Then:

Sound like your kind of place?

I’m not convinced culture works like that.

Culture is how people behave when a project is going badly.

It’s whether somebody helps when another team is under pressure.

It’s whether a junior developer can disagree with a technical director.

It’s how the agency treats people when the deadline is uncomfortable.

It’s how account management talks to development.

It’s whether people feel safe saying “I don’t know.”

It’s how success is shared and how failure is handled.

Those things are quite difficult to photograph.

The dog is much easier.

If your culture only appears on /culture, you might not have communicated your culture.

The productised bespoke service

Then there’s the commercial version of the same thing.

Agencies sell bespoke services.

Naturally, we package them into three products.

Starter
Perfect for growing brands.

Growth
Most popular.

Enterprise
Let’s talk.

Six minutes into the first conversation, all three cease to exist and somebody starts writing a bespoke estimate.

I particularly enjoy Most popular.

Based on what?

Then there’s the proprietary process.

Discover.

Define.

Design.

Develop.

Deliver.

Five Ds arranged in a circle.

Possibly with a trademark.

It’s discovery, design and development, but now it has a diagram.

None of these things are necessarily bad.

That’s important.

Having a process is good.

Publishing indicative pricing can be useful.

An office dog is excellent.

Pizza is delicious.

Bare brick looks nice.

The problem starts when ordinary characteristics of running an agency are presented as evidence that the agency is extraordinary.

And here’s the annoying bit

It works.

Clients like visiting agencies.

If you spend your working life in a fairly conventional office, there’s something genuinely appealing about spending a morning in a converted warehouse drinking locally roasted coffee, eating a Danish and talking about ideas while somebody’s whippet wanders under the table.

There’s theatre to agency life.

And clients get to participate in it.

They remember the coffee.

They remember the office.

They definitely remember the dog.

They go back to work and say:

“I really liked them.”

That’s not trivial.

Professional services are heavily dependent on chemistry and confidence.

The agency environment helps create both.

I’m not suggesting we replace the exposed brick with suspended ceilings.

I’m suggesting we stop mistaking the scenery for the cast.

Clients buy people

Ultimately, I think this is what agency websites frequently miss.

Clients buy people.

Yes, they need evidence that you can do the work.

Relevant credentials help.

If you’re commissioning a complicated university website, knowing the agency has successfully delivered university websites before reduces risk.

If you’re commissioning an e-commerce platform, you’d probably like some evidence that they’ve done that too.

But I’m not convinced credentials are the whole proposition.

Once you’re on the pitch list, something else happens.

Can I work with these people?

Do they understand what we’re trying to do?

Will they challenge us when we’re wrong?

Can I trust them with the budget?

What happens when something goes wrong?

Do I want to spend the next year having meetings with them?

Agencies know this.

That’s why they put their best people in pitches.

Agency websites are strangely unlike agency pitches

A good pitch doesn’t usually begin with a 45-minute presentation about the office.

Nobody wheels the PlayStation into the meeting.

The dog doesn’t present slide twelve.

Instead, you put good people in the room.

They listen.

They demonstrate that they understand the problem.

They ask good questions.

They challenge assumptions.

They talk about relevant experience.

They show some work.

They make the client feel that handing them a significant amount of money isn’t going to be a disaster.

Everyone in the room is quietly answering the same question:

Can we work together?

Yet on the agency website those people are often three clicks deep under About → Meet the team, presented as a grid of headshots with a job title, favourite biscuit and an interesting fact.

That feels backwards.

Make the website the pitch

I’ve increasingly wondered what would happen if an agency was brave --- sorry --- enough to build its website around the people who would actually be in the pitch.

Not simply a bigger team page.

Make those people part of the proposition.

Let the account director explain how they run an account.

Let the creative director talk about why they challenge briefs.

Let the technical lead explain how they protect budgets and delivery teams.

Let people disagree.

Let them have opinions.

Show how they think.

Show how they work together.

Make the website feel less like a brochure describing an organisation and more like the first ten minutes of a really good chemistry meeting.

Make the website the pitch before the pitch.

There’s just one fairly enormous problem with that idea.

People leave

Agencies have churn.

Build your entire proposition around six charismatic people and six months later two of them might have left.

Another might be on parental leave.

Someone else might move into a different role.

The agency changes.

Worse, if you’ve convinced the client that they’re buying Sarah rather than the agency, Sarah leaving isn’t simply a website maintenance problem.

It’s a commercial risk.

The agency needs the client to believe they’re buying the organisation.

Which is probably one reason agency positioning retreats into abstractions.

Strategy doesn’t resign.

Creativity doesn’t go freelance.

Technology doesn’t get poached by a competitor.

Brave thinking doesn’t hand in its notice on Friday afternoon.

People do.

Agencies aren’t fixed things

There’s something else I’ve come to believe after spending much of my career working in and with agencies.

Agencies are a product of what they’re being asked to do at any one time.

Win several large e-commerce accounts and the agency starts developing deeper e-commerce capability.

Win a major brand account and the creative team might grow.

Take on a complicated digital transformation programme and suddenly you need different technical and strategic skills.

Then the work changes.

People leave.

Different people arrive.

Teams expand and contract.

Technologies change.

Capabilities that were central five years ago become less important. Things the agency barely did two years ago become a significant part of the business.

An agency’s org chart is partly a record of what its clients have been buying.

That makes the agency website’s job quite difficult.

It’s trying to create a stable identity for an organisation that is inherently fluid.

Generic positioning is safe

Seen through that lens, all the familiar agency language starts to make more sense.

Strategy. Creativity. Technology.

Those words survive.

You can change the entire development team and still offer technology.

The creative director can leave and the agency can still sell creativity.

The client mix can completely change and the proposition remains intact.

But there’s a cost.

The more you try to describe an agency in terms that will survive everything changing, the less specifically you can describe it.

Eventually everybody becomes:

Brave.

Curious.

Collaborative.

Strategic.

Creative.

Digital.

Human.

Different.

The positioning lasts forever because it barely says anything.

Maybe clients don’t buy people

So perhaps clients buy people isn’t quite right.

Clients buy confidence in people.

And the agency’s job is to make that confidence transferable.

The individuals will change.

The exact capabilities will change.

The clients will change.

Even the services will change.

What should remain is the way the agency responds.

How it thinks.

How it assembles the right people around a problem.

How it communicates.

How it behaves when something goes wrong.

How it challenges a brief.

How it balances creativity with commercial reality.

How it gets things delivered.

That’s much harder to communicate than photographing a beer fridge.

But it’s also considerably more useful.

Keep the dog

So I’m not proposing the end of agency culture.

Keep the dog.

Keep the bare brick.

Keep the locally sourced coffee.

Keep the Danish pastries.

Keep the retro toys if you genuinely like retro toys.

You can probably unplug the PlayStation.

Clients enjoy the theatre, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

But the office is the scenery.

The people are the cast.

And the agency itself is something more fluid: a collection of people and capabilities constantly reshaping itself around the work it’s being asked to do.

That’s difficult to put on a website.

Maybe that’s why so many agencies end up putting the dog there instead.

Just don’t call it Head of Barketing.

And for the love of God, don’t give it an Instagram account.