We love advertising. We love the agency business. But for all our reputation as being creative, our industry has always been strangely conservative. Almost too comfortable just letting things be. How we look, work and deal with our people hasn’t really changed at all in decades.
At Talented, a lot of us from the founding team come from jobs where we had the privilege to build and lead large teams, all while making plenty of mistakes and learning from them in the process. Most importantly though, we were lucky enough to be at a vantage point to understand how the agency business itself can be better. Of what it’ll take for those of us in this industry to actively unlearn all the cliches that we seem to have quietly absorbed into our everyday.
The world certainly doesn’t need another advertising agency. But what we believe it does need is a serious re-imagination of the agency experience - both for clients and for the talent in advertising. Working in advertising can and must feel better than it currently does for a lot of us. With Talented, we’re starting-up because we have ideas that we believe can fundamentally alter what our business means, first for those working in it and then therefore for our clients. Ideas around tackling inequity, how we value our work, how we pay, the demanding hours, the lack of skin in the game, the looming irrelevance staring agencies in our faces etc.
Now some of these ideas are actually quite boring. For starters, we believe one of the easiest ways for serious disruption in the agency business may be as simple as having a serious conversation about advertising pay grades. Especially in the junior and mid levels. If the business model has to adapt to help pay top of market compensation for top talent, then the business model simply has to adapt. Our focus will be on achieving a high talent density at our organisational core. Bringing together a group of people, only as many as necessary and no more. People with a willingness to try new ways of working, with high growth ceilings, and then innovating with how teams are built around them. Teams don’t need to always be structured as they currently are in agencies.
The inequity around which our industry has been built is another reality of advertising that history will not be kind towards. As we begin, we are proud to reveal that through our equity allocations, and further on through those who are part of our ESOP program, upwards of 20% of Talented will be talent-owned over the next few years. If we have a successful trajectory over the coming years, the spoils of that success will be shared amongst those fellow optimists who are taking this journey with us now.
Another ‘radical’ idea is to get respectable hours back as advertising’s reality. For creative talent to really thrive, we cannot be bound by industrial era notions of work-time and overwork. Towards this, our talent will see some ground-breaking policies around time-flexibility, time-off, comp-offs and benefits while they’re here. We want to do great work and get great sleep. That can't be too much to ask for?
Now, why should all this matter to our clients? Well, it’s only natural that the residual benefits of all of this will flow directly into our work for clients. At Talented, we want to give our clients the best agency experience they’ve ever had. When a client chooses us, we want them to know that we’re committed to putting the sharpest, most motivated talent in front of them. How we operate internally is going to play a huge role in making that happen.
Our hope is that through these simple actions and policies, you’re able to truly love where you work. Our north star is to build a workplace where what every member of the leadership & what their colleagues across levels think and say about the company, are the exact same. We all know perfectly well what needs to improve in the agency business: we just plan to execute it more consciously. And at the end of all of this, we just want to do great advertising. Welcome aboard!