The Four Horsemen of Agency Culture
Agency life used to be more fun.
Four horsemen. Click one.
There, I said it. I may be getting old (and cranky) but it doesn't make me wrong.
I've been really trying to diagnose why, and here's where I've landed.
The Death of Friday.
The debate is settled. WFH is here to stay. But it also killed the agency Friday.
There was such a thing as agency happy hours — when the company would actually encourage people to socialize.
These days, Friday is tumbleweed day at the office.
I like the quiet, but it's undeniable that when people lose opportunities to not-work at work, the culture dies with it.
Great ideas emerge from socializing. Serendipity sparks collaboration. Culture is born from both — mixed with laughter, complaining, and a little office gossip. Without the ritual of Friday, every post-pandemic (free lunch!) cultural event feels cringe and unnatural.
De-Launchification.
The meteoric growth of social media as the main advertising channel deteriorated the sense of a campaign launch. Launches create deadlines create urgency create panic create overtime create bonding create shared experiences create agency stories create culture.
Social media ads have more of a drip, drip, drip cadence and, most importantly, it's harder for agency people to see their work out in the real world. If you're not in the echo chamber of your brand, there's a good chance you'll never see your own ad in your feed.
Culture is built of a bit of chaos. And social media making square creative objects to fit square media inventories has, by design, removed a lot of it.
It's called programmatic, after all.
The Whole AI Thing.
Culture is what happens in between real work. Agencies used to accept that a little inefficiency (e.g. happy hours, the occasional long lunch, procrastination) is the grease of (eventual) great work.
With AI, agencies now ask people to be both more effective and more efficient. To do better and more work with less time and resource.
Which, if you've ever worked at an agency, you know is not a thing.
Under pressure of this contradiction, culture is the first thing lost. In the despair and dread of AI not really helping, people just want to go home (see "Friday" above).
Naked Holdco-ism.
Holdcos have been around for decades. This isn't new.
But they used to pretend agency identity mattered. It was a delusion — but a delusion the holdco structure believed was worth nurturing, because it had a real effect on talent. People wanted to work at a place with a POV. With a founder. So the holdco let them believe these things existed.
Today, there is no more pretense. Because pretense costs profit.
Agencies are engines of an intricate, sputtering financial machine, and everyone is keenly aware they're a cog in it. The names got merged and acronymed. Offices quickly combined and conformed. I challenge you to name one famous founder.
Here's the thing nobody says out loud: holdcos are accounting companies that happen to be creative, sometimes.
And once everyone in the building knows that — once the delusion is gone and the machinery is exposed — the culture has nothing left to stand on.