This is not another slab of scaremongering AI hyperbole. This is about remembering the reason we all got into this mad little sideshow in the first place. Why do we care? Why do we get up in the morning? Ideas. Ideas and the crazy odd-shaped people who have them. There is a perfect storm coming and I hope with every fibre of my soul that we grab the opportunity that is presenting itself.

Great ideas endure. But the people who have them have changed. The social contract that exists between agencies and talent has fundamentally shifted during and now after the COVID years. They don’t want to drink the Kool-Aid, believe the hype and be placated by an in-house barista and a couple of beanbags. For too long, what passes for culture has been toxic masculinity, long hours and little reward. People have discovered their real culture. And it's hybrid and on their terms not yours.

Procurement data proves that a vast hole has appeared in the middle of the creative workforce. Typically those who do/did the work. They have left the business. Leaving just expensive senior execs and cheaper juniors.

And here are three ways to stop the rot. Three ways to allow the talent to engage with the broader business in a way that works for everyone. Not just agencies. 

Sell ideas. Not hours. 

Clients want to buy ideas. So why sell them hours. If you sell wine, you talk about wine and love wine. If you sell t-shirts on your own website, you love t-shirts and you talk about t-shirts. If you sell hours, all you are going to talk about is hours, timesheets, recoverability, usability, utilisation….. and not the ideas.

But if you flip the script. And sell ideas. They will become your passion. Again.

Interestingly, the frenemy that is AI will help with this.

AI drives efficiency. It makes us faster, better, smarter.

But hang on. Faster?

If I’m not mistaken, we bill hours in advertising, as discussed earlier.

So AI means we can do the job faster and have more leisure time?

No, it means client procurement teams are already asking if the hours recorded are human or machine. And what the cost of that machine time is.

"Wow, this is great, it works in tandem with humans. It won’t overtake us, though. It’ll augment us. It might be able to do 80% of the job, but it will never take the last 20%.

"The human element. The spark. The magic. Whatever you want to call it. It needs handcrafting. we'll be ok.”

Hang on even if that’s true, eighty percent of your revenue just evaporated. How are you going to make that up? More work? How will you find more work? Are those billable hours? Is it making you work harder? Does the world really need more content?

But if you charge for ideas, everything becomes much clearer and much more transparent. Costing will all become based on the quality of the idea - it won't matter if it's human or machine, it’ll only matter how good it is. 

Give freelancers more respect

It’s time to wake up to the huge power shift that's happened in the past year. Freelancers were just people you brought in to satisfy the peaks in demand. Get some warm bodies in and get them to do some stuff.

But since Covid, a lot of permanent talent has either been given the boot, put on hold, or just plain screwed over, leading to a mass exodus. If you peek at the procurement data from RFI’s, you'll notice a serious thinning out of the mid-level brains and creativity in the industry. The ones who do the work. Agencies are still ditching the expensive talent because they're on a tight budget (one of their own making due to continuing to base their businesses on a broken business model). On the flip side, others are leaving because they're tired of the Victorian work-house vibe at big agencies.

Now agencies are desperate for this mid and top-level talent; but guess what? They’ve gone freelance. Agencies need them more than they need agencies. So it’s time to get the cheque book out and the red carpet out and start treating them with the respect they deserve. Irony eh? 

Build a distributed workforce 

And one way agencies can do that, is to move to a distributed workforce model.

Because talent is at a premium in the business - so in order to get the best talent, you have to operate on that talent’s terms.

This is how we launched - and we now have a bench of more than 400 freelancers all over the world. We now have the biggest, best and most awarded creative department in the world. There are 9 BAFTAS, more than 2000 Cannes Lions and every minority group you could imagine across 28 countries.

A distributed workforce cuts out all of the cost of a bricks-and-mortar operation, and allows you to deliver your clients the best service in the world wherever they are in the world. You don’t need to replicate your corporate structure in every country and it allows you to build something truly borderless over time.

But more importantly than all of that - it helps you charge for ideas not hours, refocus the business around what matters and keeps your talent happy. Like really really happy.

And this all changes the conversation around workplace culture because their workplace is wherever they want it to be, their hours are whatever they want them to be and their output is well… better.