I have nothing but love for the advertising industry.
I’ve worked in it since I left school and for that I am eternally grateful. I’d been cast out into the real world with few qualifications and even fewer prospects but chanced upon a fabulous industry — vibrant, varied, fascinating and fun.
Working in advertising has given me constant peeks into big business, showbusiness, politics and sport. What’s more, its open and random selection process has brought me lifelong friendships with a diverse and interesting cast of characters, often misfits and mavericks who thrived on rocking the boat and irking the establishment. People who flourished in advertising but could barely function outside of it. Committed to creativity, they always looked at things differently and produced the wonderful ads that were routinely hailed as “better than the programmes”. Given all this, who wouldn’t want to work in an ad agency?
Join Britain’s most civilised publication.
Challenge the consensus. Access rigorous analysis.
The answer, sadly, is people who already do.
Droves of dullards, more suited to working bureaucratically for the NHS or the London Borough of Islington, have plunged the advertising industry into a grave, existential crisis by still insisting on working from home.
This issue has come sharply into focus recently because Mark Read, CEO of WPP, the biggest advertising corporation in the world, has mandated his employees to return to the office four days a week. There have been howls of outrage and from many of them, a flat refusal to do so. In fact, thousands signed a petition to that effect.
They’ve let employees’ requests become demands. Demands become benefits and benefits become entitlements
Although I can’t speak for other workplaces, I can say with absolute certainty that advertising agencies are disastrously ill-suited to working from home. Not quite as ill-suited as bricklaying or bus-driving but not far off.
More than any other industry, advertising thrives on face to face collaboration. An ad agency’s greatest asset is the agency itself. That collective of talented, hard-working, people, all under one roof, fostering a culture of creativity.
A good agency is always greater than the sum of its parts. Pretentious as this may sound, you can feel an aura of good energy the moment you walk into one. But without that energy and the presence of those who create it, agencies are severely diminished. And in straitened economic times, perhaps too diminished to survive.
How on earth has this happened? The sowing of these self-sabotaging seeds can be traced back to about twenty years ago when agencies began indulging in a bizarre charade best described as “Pretending to be left wing”.
This is almost beyond satire because, outside of Wall Street, it’s hard to imagine a more cheerfully right-wing industry than advertising. Its very purpose is to capitalise on capitalism and make a great deal of money.
This remains the case, yet advertising luminaries have spent years pretending that the industry is a compassionate, caring, almost anti-capitalist co-operative with themselves as its principled principals. But now, given harsh economic realities, that pretence has to stop.
To be fair, not all of it was pretence. In the way they operate, ad agencies were always enlightened, progressive and way ahead of the curve. In these very pages, I’ve praised their commitment to gender equality. However, it seems gender equality has now become more important than producing good ads. Every year, the trade magazine Campaign compiles its “School Reports” for all agencies. This was simply an appraisal of the ads they’d produced and how successful they’d been. Not any more. For many years, agencies have been awarded extra points for the number of female employees they hire.
This was apparently to correct a fallacious impression that ad agencies were just like Mad Men, chauvinist and male dominated. Today advertising agencies are now increasingly female dominated — more than 50 per cent of their employees are women, and besides, Charles Saatchi, who worked in advertising in the era in which Mad Men was set, said it was “not like a single second I have ever spent in an advertising agency”.
The fact that there are so many women in advertising has given the employees (often male) who are still refusing to come in the excuse that returning to the office will discriminate unfairly against women. The other refrain is that full time in the office has an adverse effect on workers’ mental health. One claimed that the overhead lighting at the office was making her “anxious”. They all claim to want “flexible working” but in reality that “flexibility” is revealingly inflexible. On Fridays and Mondays, agencies are about as busy as the Marie Celeste.
Now agency leaders find themselves in a terrible bind. They’ve let employees’ requests become demands. Demands become benefits and benefits become entitlements. How can they now withdraw those entitlements? Not exactly the #bekind image they’ve been so keen to convey.
Fortunately for them, Mark Read may have paved the way, and WPP employees — by being dopey enough to sign a petition — have fallen into his trap. WPP have now cleverly isolated the refuseniks so when the time comes — as it no doubt will — to reduce headcount, whose heads do you think are going to roll? Apparently the scythes are already being sharpened.
I’ll tell you what I can see: The hottest agency in town will be the first one bold enough to announce, “We work together face to face in the office five days a week”.
Even though this was what every agency did before Covid, it will be presented as a new and revolutionary concept.
Because after all, isn’t that exactly what ad agencies have always done so brilliantly?
