By Gareth Jones, Chief Growth Officer & MD at Ralph NY
“Why did you leave a big, network agency to join a small, independent shop?”
A lot of people have asked me this since I quit a major holding company Op Co for founder-owned creative agency Ralph.
(And just to be clear, by a lot of people, I mean one; Justin Pearse when he asked me to write this article.)
Anyway, Justin, since you asked so nicely, there are three main reasons why I decided to defect from a creative cruise-liner to a plucky pirate ship.
Firstly, Ralph is a creative agency that specializes in social. And social is changing, rapidly. For years the algorithms have been serving up chewing gum for the eyes and Kool Aid for the brain. We’ve become trapped in junk food content economy where our addiction to instantly gratifying, snackable social has led to slack-jawed scrolling and mind-numbing memes.
The technical term for this is limbic hijack, whereby craftily created content bypasses the thinky bit of your brain and goes straight for the prehistoric lizardy bit, releasing that delicious dopamine hit without you even realizing.
But people are getting tired of asinine algorithms and lowest common denominator content. Increasingly, they want thoughtful, high-quality social that moves them on an emotional level, sparking synapses and filling up the feel-o-meter.
In short, the landscape is moving from addiction to attention, providing brands and their agencies with a much richer environment within which to tell meaningful stories that move people consciously to action.
Ralph is at the forefront of this seismic societal shift.
This brings me to my second point. On the whole, large network agencies are simply not structured to keep pace with pop culture. Yes, they might have fancy research teams, access to some tasty data sets and the smartest people money can buy, but the truth is they have become corporations. And as politically inexpedient as it might be to point out, corporate culture values capitulation over creativity, spreadsheets over spontaneity, mediocrity over magic.
When you have institutional shareholders, relentless pressure to deliver cost-efficiencies and a mandate for margin improvement, it becomes very hard to maintain a consistent focus on creative excellence as a main priority.
Within these creative corporations, innovation, ingenuity and inventiveness tend to happen in-spite of the system rather than because of it. The upshot is that network agency clients, which are often even bigger corporate entities, get the ideas their agency thinks they’ll buy as opposed to the ideas that might challenge them, push them in new directions and ultimately help them better connect with their customers.
None of this is particularly new news, but as consolidation continues to sweep the agency landscape and client budgets continue to shrink, the question becomes how much more can the holding companies squeeze from their Op Cos before the model breaks?
Selfishly, I didn’t want to be around to find out.
Thirdly and finally (you can probably see where I’m going with this), independent agencies have agility, collaboration and creativity hardwired into their DNA. This is not for vanity or ego. It’s for survival. With less to offer in terms of economies of scale or endless cross-sell opportunities, independent shops live and die by the quality of their creative.
They must move quickly to stay ahead of the competition, they must work cross-functionally to make the most of their talent and they must intimately understand their audiences to remain relevant. In other words, delivering creative excellence always comes first because that is the only way to succeed.
Sure, smaller shops might be further down the food-chain chasing comparatively modest budgets, but in my experience, clients are becoming wary of the global full-service model. In the same way you wouldn’t trust a restaurant that served Chinese, Indian and Italian food from the same menu, clients are turning to agencies that do one thing perfectly. For Ralph that means understanding audiences and making stuff they love and share. Refreshingly, it’s that simple. And in a world of every increasing complexity, it should be the job of agencies to keep things simple. It’s not rocket science, after all.
(This is just my perspective. And like all perspectives it’s biased and ultimately flawed. But that’s the nature of opinions. They’re there to be tested, argued, debunked or validated. I very much enjoyed my time in holding company agencies and worked with a very many people way smarter than me. I just feel it’s time for a tide change.)
