The future of adland’s workforce
Jon Williams, founder of Liberty Guild suggests how industry working is changing, and needs to keep on changing – with better use of freelancers, AI-powered briefs and the selling of ideas not hours.
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While it's important for us all to think about the future of the industry, when it comes to talent and workforce, we need to be thinking about our staff in the here and now, or there won’t be a future to think about.
The current agency set-up allows for nothing more than the chewing up and spitting out of staff.
The ad industry needs to totally overhaul a huge chunk of its working practices.
It’s not just depressing, it’s borderline barbaric.
Williams feels that the current agency set-up leads to poor retention of staff.
The main reason for this barbarism is that the agencies that employ people generally work on a model that was created in the 1950s and was already out of date by the 1990s. The internet only made things worse.
And then along came AI and made the future seem scarier and more confusing than ever before.
The very notion of charging for ideas immediately elevates the brilliance of what great creatives can achieve to where they belong.
If we're to emerge healthy and happy from this potentially catastrophic maelstrom of messiness, the ad industry needs to totally overhaul a huge chunk of its working practices.
The list is long, but here are three fixes that, if implemented now, can make a massive difference in the future; for our staff now, their lives going forward and the future of us all.
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Charging for ideas immediately elevates the brilliance of what great creatives can achieve to where they belong
Charge for ideas not hours
After what feels like years and years of banging the drum for charging for ideas not hours (we launched the Liberty Guild on this premise five years ago), the thinking hit the news a couple of weeks ago when Martin Sorrell decided he also thought it was a good idea.
Ideas are inspirational and aspirational. They have a clear value and worth.
The very notion of charging for ideas immediately elevates the brilliance of what great creatives can achieve to where they belong. This is what makes us special; the reason we entered the business, yet we’re essentially saying it’s the same as a lawyer. We’re aiming to delight our customers – we do this with ideas. They’ll get it, trust me.
Ideas are inspirational and aspirational. They have a clear value and worth. By elevating the genius of the idea, you’re motivating your own workplace to work smarter and match efficiency with creativity. Wait a minute – ideas? Working faster? Yes, there’s an AI elephant in the room.
Working with AI can help teams efficiently create better briefs.
Understand Generative AI
Your workforce will never be able to come up with energy-efficient lightbulb moments of genius if they continue to be fed substandard briefs from their clients.
Freelancers are part of the solution, not an inconvenience.
The goal should be to improve the brief development process. At a time when most businesses are either wrestling with how AI can positively affect their business and not be its death knell or just using it to do things more quickly and cheaply, we have developed an AI-powered prompt process that enables client marketing teams to efficiently create better briefs. This helps agencies generate better ideas and everyone in the industry to create better work.
The solution to an agile and flexible agency is a distributed workforce.
Create a distributed workforce
The future of the workforce needs to be agile and flexible. The answer to this is a distributed workforce, cutting out all of the cost of a bricks-and-mortar operation. A virtual global network of experts, available as and when you need them for a fraction of the cost of what a traditional office-based network would charge.
You don’t need to replicate your corporate structure in every country and it allows for flexibility and true expertise for each market and project. We need the right people, with the relevant knowledge and expertise, in the right place at the right time. And they want to work wherever and on whatever they want, so we need to make it possible for them to do that.
As talent within the industry thins out, agencies need to realise that there is a largely untapped mine of brilliance spread across the globe.
You don’t need to replicate your corporate structure in every country and it allows for flexibility and true expertise for each market and project. As talent within the industry thins out, agencies need to realise that there is a largely untapped mine of brilliance spread across the globe. Treat them with the respect they deserve and they’ll work for you like the elite knights for hire of old from whom they derive their name [free + lance. Coined by Walter Scott (1771–1832) in Ivanhoe (1820) to describe a medieval mercenary warrior]. Fresh; motivated; able to see the project in ways you’d never imagined. And then you can leave them to recharge rather than watch their batteries drain down.
The future of the workforce in adland can be a rich and exciting one, not unlike the one many of us saw when we first joined it. But we have to work harder to make our business allow our workforce to thrive and flourish. Once we learn to stop beating them up and treat them with the respect they deserve, give them the resources they need and the inspiration to deliver amazing work. Simple…isn’t it?
