Making the nut as an independent agency is never easy, but in a time of (shh!) clear and emerging economic recession, it's particularly challenging. Here's what M&AD has learned in the past year.
1) Tariffs and the threat of tariffs create misery. A promising DTC client went completely dark after its supply chain was cut, because when you are in the start-up phase, any seismic shock will spook your investors. Uncertainty around things that used to be certain is not advisable.
2) SEO keyword seeding continues in copywriting, more by habit than need. You already knew that AI was eating search, but that doesn't mean that the disciplines and tactics used in the last few decades are just going to cease and desist.
In the long term, we believe this will lead to more interesting and spontaneous content, but in the short, seeding your copy is still going to happen. If only to show clients due diligence.
3) AI "works" because it tells people what they want to hear. You don't have to be a particularly diligent student of history to know this doesn't end well, or that humans are very bad at resisting this. Just because the propoganda is coming from inside the house doesn't make it any less dangerous. In point of order, more so. (For the record, yes, we use AI. Sparingly, with great care, only at version zero, and from multiple sources. We're not anti-tech. Just pro-human.)
4) Working from home also means ghosting is easier. Every agency endures summer lulls and contact issues from vacationing personnel, but the frequency of such events is definitely on the uptick. Some of the things we've seen in the last year are real howlers, and unprecedented in the decades that we've been doing this.
5) Loyalty is increasingly seen as insecurity, or a failure to negotiate. If your client is talking about exit strategies and make-or-break KPIs, that's a red flag. And if a manager is very enthused about AI, you may want to start wondering why they aren't as enthused about developing their personnel. We don't recommend a direct ask on this, unless you've already got your next full-time gig lined up.
6) We're in a global sea change due to political forces. Regardless of your opinion of any of the governments in play, long-standing alliances, manufacturing centers, and supply chains are increasingly in flux. "Plus-one" diversification strategies fly in the face of efficiency, but add critical risk mitigation, which is non-negotiable.
Whether or not declining populations with work forces that have been trained to value white over blue collar work can be made to pivot is an open question. So is the appetite of younger people for buying in to past dogmas about work meritocracies, money equalling speech, and embracing any form of nuance. Add management that's enthused about technology replacing employment, and you can understand their cynicism.
7) Bad actors are gaining by being early adopters. T'was ever thus, but criminals are taking advantage of job seekers, crypto, deepfakes and AI to step up their operations, and the field is also taking on more of an industrialized military approach. All of which leads to grist for conspiracy mills, and the next point, which is...
8) People want real conversations, but are afraid to have them. We've had clients beg for candor, then punish when it's been given. We've had others dictate the output to the point where pranking seemed to be on the table, all while professing very different ideals. It's your call whether this is reticence or self-censorship, but what is beyond debate is that it is sand in the gears of productivity.
9) The old ways of marketing give you greater share of voice, and still work. When you take in a podcast, TED talk or effective presentation, there's really nothing going on here that wasn't at work centuries ago, just without the modern-day trappings. We've seen strong wins from long copy, direct mail (ye gads), and even honest-to-God telephone calls in the past two quarters, if only because the channel is increasingly free of traffic. Marketing and advertising teams that only do what's comfortable, or what management or the bots approve, are doing their organizations a disservice. But they are, alas, retaining their clients.
10) Your morale is your personal choice. Reading all of these at once may lead you to believe that the past year at M&AD has been a struggle, and since we deal in truth here, that's accurate. Challenging management that needs its own opinions fed back to itself has always been a hard way to make a living. We've never been good at keeping quiet when a client was about to do harm to their operation, which isn't always conducive to retention.
But we remain steadfast in the belief that if/then, rather than a/b testing, is critical to driving not just temporary gains, but sustainable ones. We also believe that when data drives, you should pay attention, that single KPI thinking is for bad actors, and that those who do not love the journey and work of marketing are not the people you will see later on down the road.
We also love what we do, and are getting back to it. Forward!
