A class apart; how a new hybrid agency model could solve the industry’s talent challenge

In our office the debate continues to rage about the pros and cons of post-pandemic, flexible, hybrid working. We worry about its long term effect on our culture, our work and our relationships. After all, it’s hard to be a gang when you rarely see your fellow gangsters.

It’s hard to be a gang when you rarely see your fellow gangsters.

And we’re right to worry. Everything has its downsides. But it also has its upsides. And if there’s one thing that hybrid flexible working has opened up, one positive we can take from this dreadful pandemic and the last, tortuous 18 months, it’s the removal of one of the biggest barriers to the long-term lack of social diversity in this business we all love.

For the past few years, we have become more and more concerned about the increasingly narrow talent pool available to us. Great creativity, whether in execution or strategy, has always relied on being able to draw on a diverse group of people, with very diverse life experiences and perspectives that act as the stimulus that surfaces in brilliant and uniquely original ideas. 

Above: Flexible working has enabled those who live outside of London and the south-east to consider a career in advertising. 

It is, in our opinion, the very thing that sets us apart from other industries. Right now, because of the increasing socio-economic barriers to entry, we fear we are in danger of becoming quite a monocultural profession.

Let’s be absolutely clear, we’re not the only people to have this concern and to have acted on it. In April, Jed Hallam at Snap Inc, and Spotify’s Emma Hopkins co-founded Common People as a creative industry forum for those from a working class background. Within a month, it had 320 members from the world of fashion, publishing, gaming and music, united by the desire to reduce barriers to entry but also just as importantly, to help mentor those from a working class background to progress successfully in their career.

Because of the increasing socio-economic barriers to entry, we fear we are in danger of becoming quite a monocultural profession.

And we know that some London agencies have, quite admirably, sought to subsidise accommodation for entry-level employees to be able to live in London. But that still works off the assumption that the solution is to make working in London affordable. We also know that doing outreach activity, especially when it’s more than an hour away from our home and offices, is both time-consuming and often labour intensive. 

Above: Some of the VCCP team outside the new Stoke office [left to right] Lynsey Monroe, Learning & Development Manager; Michael Lee, Chief Strategy Officer; Jim Thornton, Executive Creative Director; Kenny Dada, Account Manager, and Gemma Smyth, Senior Planner.

It was the pandemic, and evidence that remote working for months on end was practically possible, that showed us there was now an easier and more desirable long-term solution to both problems. For all the prodigiously talented young people who could and should be working in our industry, and couldn’t or didn’t want to work and live in the South East, we could now take the agency to them.

We formally launched our eighth office, the VCCP Stoke Academy in October 2020. Why Stoke? Well, why not, is probably our best answer. No London agency had tried very hard to attract local creative talent in Stoke before. At a practical level it’s got two brilliant universities, office space is considerably cheaper, it’s got excellent train connections to London and yes, the fact one of us is a local-born Stoke City obsessive may have been a factor. But, more importantly than that, when we started to make tentative enquiries with local universities and sixth-form colleges, the positive response we got was overwhelming.

We believe that a hybrid model of working is utterly feasible.

The critical point is that VCCP Stoke’s status as a training academy is something that we’re hoping will only be a short-term one. Our real ambition is to convert VCCP Stoke into a permanent agency office that’s not just financially sustainable but actually a future model for how agencies grow.

We want to demonstrate that it’s possible to create a way to attract local talent without forcing people to move to London, but also retain our existing talent who too often have felt they’ve had to leave the industry to move back closer to home. Above all, we believe that a hybrid model of working, where local talent is able to remain local, whilst being sufficiently connected to our London agency that we behave like one agency team when it makes sense to, is utterly feasible.