The Quills

?? NEW WORK ?? We could not be more proud to have been a part of the launch of Industry Standard, a new venture aiming to bring more diverse and undiscovered talent into the production world. At a time when so much is up in the air for everyone around advertising, marketing and production, it's incredibly important for all of us to support...all of us. Yes, the people we know and have worked with, but also the people who may not yet have had a chance to shine. Production world legends Jennifer Sofio Hall and Bedonna Smith decided to do just that and it is a privilege to have been a part of bringing their message into the world from a writing perspective. Huge, huge thanks to the great Max Erdenberger, who led the charge on this effort and brought us in to work on it. It's always a pleasure to work with the best. We can't wait to see where this venture goes. Inevitably, it will be somewhere truly wonderful. https://lnkd.in/dCvW-PxC

My prediction for 2025: No one knows anything right now. Look, I get the tantalizing prospect of trying to be Nostradamus at this time of year. It costs nothing. It gets engagement. It raises your profile online. And no one will hold you to any of it at the end of the year. But let's face it, so much of this type of discourse is either wish-casting, self-promotion, self-interested corporate posting or blind guessing. Sure, there are educated guesses and broadly correct assumptions, but through the years, the only thing that's been proven to be absolutely correct is that no one knows what will happen. Especially in business. If that weren't the case, we'd all be Warren Buffett. But I'm not. And you're probably not either. (If you are, hi Mr. Buffett!) If you're like me, the things that you thought would be absolutely sure-fire bets ended up being nothing and the things that you thought would be nothing turned into game-changers. My long time freelance partner Tyler Magnusson and I once worked on an advertising campaign for 4 months that went nowhere, but the spot we were asked to pitch in on for literally one night during that same project ended up being the best commercial we ever made. When I started Sleeping Giants in 2016, I thought it would be a two week passion project. It turned into an international campaign against hate that lasts to this day and was nominated for a Nobel Prize this year. Conversely, I was told that The Quills would be an instant success when it started, that the business world needed it, and it has taken everything that I, and our team, has had to make it truly work. And we're still fighting for it everyday. You just never know. We don't know if AI is going to take over the world or run out of capital. We don't know if crypto is going to go up or down. We don't know if our political system will falter or thrive. On a smaller level, we don't know if a call will come in that changes the course of our career or if that idea we have will sink or fly. Instead of prognosticating or listening to someone else do it, it's far better to stop looking for answers on this platform, educate ourselves, develop some ideas of our own, then take some real chances. Ante up. Make your own future. Start something. I get it. This last two years has been tough, especially if you're in advertising and marketing like me. I have, myself, felt stuck and frustrated that things aren't what they used to be at times. But I've also spent time looking for potential opportunities outside of what is available and certainly what is posted on here. I'm not sure if those things will work, but the good news is that no one does. Small ideas blow up into bigger ones. Big companies falter and go bankrupt. We're all just throwing darts here. Whether you're a part of a big company, you work for yourself, you're unemployed or you just feel stuck, put in a bet on yourself. It might not work, but it also might. Remember, none of us know shit.

Contrary to what some prognosticators would have us believe, great writing actually matters more than ever. Our second year in business proved it. In 2024, we helped a wide range of clients with an even wider range of writing projects, from helping groundbreaking VC firm Emerson Collective create their incredible annual magazine, Positive Sum, with five editorial pieces about to creating a new brand voice and a major market advertising campaign for Fowler Packing Company's citrus brand Peelz to curating content all year for a completely new social network, guide:human, to providing ongoing writing and conceptual support for Lyft. We'd also like to thank our other clients who trusted us with their important writing projects this year, including Megafire Action, Lead, DIKO, Whatnot, Influence Media Partners, Heidi Hackemer, Valmont Industries, Inc., Dental Care Alliance, and Siegel+Gale among others. We are a completely new model for getting writing done. We're also still very much getting started. With the headwinds that our industry has faced this year, we don't take it for granted that companies continue to place value in real, insightful and strategic writing by actual humans, but also have entrusted us to do it for them. Huge thanks to all of them and our bench of over 400 writers who are all the best in the business. LFG in 2025! #writing #2024 #newmodel

Man, it can feel like pushing a boulder uphill to defend working humans these days, but I'm certainly going to keep trying. Edward Cotton had a great post today about the amazing opportunity out there for someone, anyone, to start a more human-driven agency that's more focused on people solving problems than people creating technology to help humans solve problems. That is exactly the idea that has been at the center of The Quills since I started it almost two years ago: Humans, particularly human writers, have the unique ability to solve problems for other humans. It's not that AI isn't incredibly useful or the answer to all kinds of problems or the entire future of everything everywhere all at once. It probably is at least one of those or all of them together. AI is undoubtedly going to change a lot, if not everything. There. I said it. But this isn't really a post about AI. It's about us. People. The truth is that there still needs to be room for messy shit and humans are great at both creating a mess and then wading through it to solve things. We have a problem that perhaps we ourselves created. We don't know how to fix it. Then we get together, think about how that might happen, try some stuff that doesn't work and eventually find something that does. Contrary to what some companies would have us believe, it's seldom a straight line. An answer spit out to you in 2 seconds is rarely the right one. Humans are also better at listening, empathizing, understanding, and relating to other humans. Humans who happen to be in charge of getting things done. We don't just need solutions. We need other people to understand our problems first before they come to those solutions. I will be the first to tell you that, at The Quills, we have not always gotten everything right the first time. Or even the second time. Writing is not a direct line and it never has been. It requires listening, deducing, formulating, THEN writing, THEN editing, THEN rewriting. That's how it has always been done. It's messy. It's frustrating. It's difficult. We've had clients bail on us because we didn't get it right the first time. We've also had plenty of clients stick with us precisely because of the same reason. They understand that, to get to a place that's relatable, effective and on brand, it's going to take longer than just typing out a prompt. Look, it's the end of 2024. The majority of the marketing industry is in flux, waiting for tech companies to subsume our business or trying to invent some tech that will somehow compete with them. Data rules the day, turning potential living, breathing buyers into numbers that can be analyzed ad nauseam. Holding companies are merging and laying off hundreds in anticipation of this great reckoning. But if you ask me, we're making a colossal mistake walking away from what and who got us here: Humans. Because we are, in fact, amazing. We did create AI, after all. #humans #ai #marketing #untappedpotential

If the OmniPublic megamerger didn't lay it out clearly enough, everything has changed in this business or it's about to. And yet, all of the ways our industry is covered, spoken about, awarded and navigated haven't changed at all. Holding companies are cracking under financial pressure and the encroachment from tech companies, forcing them to merge, make huge staff cuts and overstep with their agencies just to appease shareholders. Of course, none of this means that clients will get a better creative product, improved insights or more favorable results. Filling that void are new models, independent shops and tech platforms that are more nimble, just as (if not more) creative and help fill real day-to-day needs for clients. But look at our trade publications, our award shows and our conferences and you'd never know. To them, it's still 2005. It's no suprise, but everything in our industry is geared towards the biggest of players, as they underwrite so much of it, ensuring their dominance into the future. But what we're seeing now is the breaking apart of this dominance. The financials no longer make sense. Clients have lots of choices and, beyond a handful of agencies owned by the holding companies who consistently kill it (we all know who they are), the juice may no longer be worth the squeeze, especially with quicker, equally smart strategic and creative resources on the market that don't require paying extra money to support a stock price. Despite this change, the media that covers our industry still pays virtually no attention to the upstarts, save for a few incredibly great ones like Mischief @ No Fixed Address (well deserved!), handing the holding companies a structural advantage over indies. Award shows and conferences are priced ridiculously high so that new models and agencies can't afford to enter, strongly favoring the networks and holding companies. (Really, is there any reason why "network of the year" even matters anymore?) Even annual features like "Small Agency of the Year" in our legacy trade publications exclude different models that don't fit neatly into a box, keeping marketers from hearing about them. If our industry is changing, and it is, it needs to change completely. Not just the holding companies and the technology and the compensation models, the *entire* thing. That means new trade media that cover the entire industry, not just the biggest players. That means award shows that understand that creativity and ideas often come from the scrappiest of players who may not be able to fork over $1500 for an entry like the networks can. That means breaking the mold in pitches and yearly agency recognition so that different models can get as much sunshine for their ideas as the holding companies do for their names. We are watching as the business side of our industry is changing before our eyes. It's time for everything else to change with it. #change #media #awards #pitches #newmodel #indies

Happy Independence Day to all of our fellow agencies and studios celebrating today.

??NEW WORK ?? So excited to see our new brand voice for Fowler Packing Company’s Peelz out in the wild. Big thanks to Director of Marketing Kiah Ruvalcaba for trusting us with this. We do literally every type of writing for business, but it has been so fun to go back to our advertising roots on this. Credit to Tyler Hampton, Monique Verrier and our whole Peelz team for making this happen. #newwork #writing #brandvoice #advertising

We just joined Bluesky Social. Please follow us there at @thequills.bsky.social?. We intend to share our thoughts on writing, recommendations for other people's writing and, of course, relentless self-promotion of our own writing. But, yeah, it'll be mostly about writing. Man, it's great to find a new platform that, so far anyway, is free of the vitriol, hate and noise that plague so many of the social platforms these days. We are loathe to open too many social channels because no one needs to hear from us *that* much, but it's a good opportunity to be a part of something that has a real possibility to change the tenor of public discourse. #bluesky #socialmedia #writing

Sometimes, you work on a project with so much purpose, that it doesn't feel like work at all. That was the case for us with Emerson Collective's Positive Sum Magazine, which featured 7 long-form articles including one for Midi Health, an incredible company that provides midlife healthcare for women. One of our many incredibly talented writers, MJ Deery, not only researched the subject matter extensively and did multiple interviews with patients, she also used her own experiences with and knowledge of women's health to create something very, very different. Much like the company itself. You can read it, along with several of the other pieces we helped to create, here: https://lnkd.in/eCHUbFXE We started The Quills to bring a new level of writing to every aspect of business. To be able to work with visionary companies like Emerson Collective, who want to constantly push what is possible, on a project of this magnitude, is something we never dreamed of this early on. A huge thank you to them for trusting us with it.

?? NEW WORK FROM The Quills AND Emerson Collective ?? When we started The Quills, it was our dream to bring a high level of quality to *every* type of writing, not just advertising and marketing. Dream unlocked. We were asked to provide editorial writing for Positive Sum, the annual magazine from Emerson Collective, the company founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, featuring their many funded startups, and we couldn't believe our luck. The outcome is the most beautifully designed, thoughtfully executed, and, if we may say so, well-written magazine we could have ever imagined. We feel incredibly privileged to be a part of it and to have a client who really, truly believes that great writing is essential to doing business. A huge thank you to Gabe Kleinman Jon Willard Nicole Radford Elena Hale Kim Jacobs and the whole Emerson Collective team for trusting us with this hugely important project. And a massive thanks to our team of writers, Liz Gumbinner MJ Deery Spenser Mestel Gia Mora and Laura Bolt for absolutely crushing these phenomenal editorial pieces. If you can't get a copy, you can see it digitally here: https://lnkd.in/eCHUbFXE