Meet The Company About To Steal Your Superstars

That irresistible sucking sound you hear is the drain of talent flowing away from adland to tech, entertainment, and other industry sectors who hold the perception of greater flexibility and creative freedom. 

With the outflow of talent already such a problem, agency bosses must have groaned today when Campaign Live announced the launch of The Fawnbrake Collective, a new model for dynamically organizing networks of talent around marketing challenges. 

Architected by former Amelia Torode, former chief strategy officer for TBWA\London, its hard to imagine Fawnbrake won’t just have its absolute pick of the cream of the crop. This is, of course, bad news for agencies and great news for brands. 

The rise of individual talent > organization reputation

In the marketing world, personal brands and shared working experiences are starting to eclipse (or at least catch up to) organizational brands in review and hiring decisions. 

Put differently, brands want to work with the individuals they’re impressed by and have enjoyed working with in the past, rather than simply trust that all talent is equal within the partner agency they’ve selected. Because, of course, its not. As Torode points out in a post published on Fawnbrake’s site, clients are sick of the bait-and-switch of falling in love with one team during the pitch and then getting an entirely different group of people. 

And one thing that’s for sure is that agency reputation is no sacred cow. One need look no further at the incredibly volatile world of agency review, or the fact that everyone from the tech platform to the publisher to the consulting group is now claiming to be able to do what your agency does. 

In a context where everyone and every type of organization is claiming to be able to do the same stuff, and frankly has the case studies to back it up, it becomes extraordinarily sensible to use gut feel and reference the past experience of actually working with someone to make these decisions. As former Buzzfeed head-turned Daily Mail US chief turned CEO of Cheddar Jon Steinberg told me at Cannes a few years ago after the launch of the Truffle Pig Snapchat agency; “Life is too short not to work with the people you like.”

What talent wants

So, if talent and personal brand are achieving a new premium relative to organizational brand, the question becomes: what does talent want? 

First, talent wants creative freedom. In the world of brand marketing, this means the ability to select (or at least only choose to keep) clients who are hiring the team for their actual creative ideas, not just to check some box and have the agency do exactly what they want. 

Second, talent wants work style flexibility. We live in a totally global world with an incredible diversity of choices people can make about from where and how they want to live their lives while still being just an internet connection away from everyone and everything else. Where people chose to settle has historically been a vector either of family or work with increasing tension between the two, as well as a huge variety of new factors. If someone could design a hybrid model of remote and in person work, it would open up an immediate global talent pool. 

Third, and kind of the whole game, is time. If you haven’t yet, go read Torode’s beautiful invocation about how off agency life and demands are relative to real human needs around time published earlier this week. 

We’re only just beginning to have the conversation about time and human productivity, but make no mistake: in a world that pairs growing automation and artificial intelligence with an over abundance of media, stimuli and opportunity, one of the central philosophical and social debates of the coming decades will be our relationship with time. 

Would people be better suited with a default 4-day work week? Is human creativity better served by big intense flow periods followed by ebbs of relaxation, contemplation and rejuvenation that obliterate our current “vacation” model? What will be our new social contract? How much work and of what type is sufficient to be considered a full member of society and what benefits does that entitle one to? 

If those questions, all ultimately about that most finite of our resources time, are big, ponderous and heavy, what’s clear and present and easy is that if you design a system that better respects talent’s time, you’re going to get more talent. 

Of course, none of this is to say that Fawnbrake is guaranteed to work. It is going to take a totally different approach to organizing talent around tasks, and probably a speciality in a new type of project management. It’s going to take recruiting a set of clients actually willing to try something new and do things differently (no surprises that the founding client partner is a fast growing startup, not an ancient consumer brand). 

Whatever the challenges though, what’s for sure is that there will be demand; that the greatest talents in our industry are increasingly looking for ways to organize their work around their lives and not the other way around. What's for sure is that there are many restless souls this morning reading Fawnbrake’s announcement from Eames chairs in prim, beautiful agency prisons, wondering if it might be the break they’ve been waiting for.