Follow The Numbers

A couple of years ago, Business Insider published a list of the richest people in advertising.

https://www.businessinsider.sg/the-richest-people-in-advertising-ranked-by-income-2016-11/?r=US&IR=T

It makes for very sobering reading.

No female executive made the list.

And not a single creative.

In fact, the vast majority of these extremely well paid and vastly influential advertising industry heavy hitters are middle-aged, white men who have never been anywhere near an ad and wouldn’t have the first clue how to make one.

Most of them have backgrounds in finance or law.

Martin Sorrell was of course an accountant.

Maurice Levy was an IT guy.

And can you really picture John Wren rolling his sleeves up and writing an ad?

Clearly, there’s an important lesson to be learnt here.

And that’s to do with a topic that probably 99% of creative people have little or no interest in dealing with.

Money.

Let’s face it, unless we are taking about how much we are earning (or how little), money is not really the primary concern of the average creative person.

And in my experience this attitude is actively encouraged by our account service colleagues and agency CEOs.

“You creative guys just need to focus on coming up with brilliant ideas. Leave the money stuff to us,” is the usual refrain.

This is not only condescending, it’s also the worst possible advice you could be given.

Real Power

Money drives everything.

There’s a very good reason why the vast majority of agency CEOs (the only people – other than the CFOs of course – with real power in any agency) have an account service background.

It’s because they do precisely the thing they tell you not to do: they worry about the money.

Money is the reason you get to do creative work in the first place. If your mind-blowing, award-winning creative concepts are not generating money for your agency, sooner or later a guy you’ve never met is going to look at his spreadsheet and decide to “right size” your agency.

And guess who gets screwed first? Here’s a hint: not the person who’s worrying about the money.

What happened?

Creative people have ceded power and control.

Just think about it.

The only way an advertising agency makes money is by making ads.

And the only people in the ad agency who really make ads are creative people.

(Yes. I know. Countless other people and departments contribute to the process of making ads. But at the end of the day, it still comes down to a couple of people staring at a blank layout pad or an empty computer screen and trying to fill it with something captivating, meaningful and effective. By tomorrow morning.)

So how come the people who run the ad agencies are not the people who make the ads?

It’s because creative people have let them.

As soon as the sordid topic of money is raised, you can almost see the lights switching off in creative people’s eyes. We don’t really want to know about how much our agency charges clients for our work. We leave the negotiation of costs with creative suppliers like photographers and production companies to our producers. And then we don’t bother to find out what the final agreed cost is.

We are perfectly content to work in our little creative bubble, conceptualizing, brainstorming, crafting and tweaking, without ever knowing the very real financial implications of what we do and the way we do it.

Hell, most of the time we don’t even we even want to present our work to the people who are paying for it – the clients. That way we can sit back and complain bitterly about “suits who can’t sell great work”, remaining oblivious to the unpleasant fact that perhaps, just maybe, our wonderful work just wasn’t quite right for that particular client’s needs.

So we stay in our ivory towers while just about everybody else in the agency is getting on with actually running the business. And, as far as senior management are concerned, making the money.

Survival Tactics

If you want any kind of career longevity, you need to start taking the numbers seriously. In other words, start thinking like a business owner and not an employee.

Despite what your account service colleague says, it is your business to know exactly how much money the accounts you’re working on are generating for your agency. So find out.

Discuss quotations and costs for the production of your creative work, be it print, TV or digital, with your producer. Discover where savings can be made without impacting the quality of the work. Then find out what markups are being charged by your account service.

Don’t just leave it to the suits to present your work for you. Make sure the client knows that you are the one doing the creative work that they are, hopefully, so pleased with.

To put it simply, make sure you know, in as much detail as possible, exactly how much you are worth to your agency.

And make sure your boss knows too.

At the very least, even if things to go south and some anonymous backroom bean counter decides that your position is surplus to requirements, you’ll be in a good position to maximize your value to your next agency.

Or better still, you’ll have the basic knowledge you’ll need to set up an agency of your own.

And maybe even end up joining that list of the richest people in advertising.