The New Wave

Note: This piece was originally written for Design Informer when Jad approached me to write something for the site. I’ll link to the article when it appears on Design Informer soon.

A friend of mine has recently opened a small, four-person shop in downtown Toronto, which he and his business partner started after returning to Toronto from a few years out of the country. He originally left because he felt that the creative community was far too self-centered instead of reaching out to each other to collaborate or work together. After taking a couple years to travel and work abroad, he decided to give Toronto one last shot to see if that was still the case. When he realized that an entirely new mentality had developed — focused on collaboration, innovation, and a communal sense of pride, not only in the city, but in the emerging creative scene as a whole — it was a no-brainer for them to hang their shingle up and officially set up shop.

The change he noticed is something that has taken over the creative community over the last few years. The cliche examples are immediately obvious, with designers swarming to blogs, Twitter and other social media outlets in droves like few other segments of society. However, when you start digging deeper, it becomes apparent that this is just a small (if powerful) example of a larger trend at work which has resulted in a paradoxical mentality of fragmentation-alongside-collaboration within the creative community. In short, we’re far more dispersed than ever before, with individual freelancers rising to the tops of their game independent of an agency environment. But at the same time, the lion’s share of creatives are more than willing to help each other out, collaborate on projects (commercial or personal), and even though more of the creative class nowadays are working alone, there’s never been a more potent time for a sense of community to truly develop. In fact, it already has.

The End of the Golden Age

The old agency model is on the decline, that much is obvious. While it will never fully disappear, it’s certainly not the only option for clients. Nowadays, specialist shops and networks of talented freelancers can offer the same services that a big agency can, at a fraction of the cost. The downside, of course, is that most of the largest accounts still desire that big-agency safety net, and that’s not a bad thing. It just means that the big agencies, while they can still innovate and come up with fantastic campaigns, will increasingly have their share of the creative pie taken away as bigger and bigger clients decide to put their faith into a more nebulous, experimental small studio or freelancer network.

This is part of a larger trend in the Western world over the past half decade or so, where there has increasingly been a shift to focus on substance over style in the products people buy and services people use. Nowadays, clients on the whole are (rightfully) looking to work with someone who they can build a long-term relationship with, not just who can produce the bang-up launch campaign. While style undoubtedly has its place, this focus on substance has its proof in many different parts of society, from the cars people buy to the products people use to the companies to which they pledge their loyalty. The campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s, where the most memorable ones focused more on stylizing a product than proving its worth as a product, have become a distant memory for many. The rise of the green movement, where consumers are now actively background-checking the companies they buy from and other measures, is an ideal proof of this shift in mentality. Of course, there’s always exceptions (see: music videos, top-40 radio, interviews with athletes), but on a day-to-day level, the attitudes of the masses have shifted markedly from style to substance.

So if you’re a client, and you’re looking for someone to work with to help formulate your strategy, who do you look to? There’s those big agencies of the world, most of whom are owned by a handful of global companies, have been around for donkey’s years, have produced great work and have the award shelves to prove it; with them, you have the safety of experience, yet you’re simply one more name for them to chuck onto their roster of clients. Or, you go to a smaller shop or a team of freelancers, who might offer you a pedigree of agency work on an individual basis, but who as a collective, due to their size and mentality, are willing to push more boundaries and be more creative in their work. They work together with other professionals who have expertise in different areas, and while the structure may be alien, they can do things the big fish can’t.

The New Wave

This willingness — to collaborate and innovate together, to share what each other are working on and how they did it, which together fosters this emerging community of like-minded, we’re-all-in-this-together creatives — is what gives them their advantage. They can push limits because they haven’t been defined yet in this embryonic state; they can offer expertise bigger agencies can’t because the most talented individuals of any niche are not going to be found under one roof, they’re working for themselves; they can also cut costs, but not because the work’s of any lesser in quality. While the biggest clients have yet to jump all-in for the new wave, it’s only a matter of time before a Ford, Vodafone or Coca-Cola picks one of these companies as their agency of record. Old agencies will survive, don’t get me wrong, but now’s the time for the true, game-changing rise of the smaller, innovative and agile shops who depend as much on contracted freelance talent as they do the expertise of the person in the next desk.

I don’t for a second believe that the old agency model will entirely disappear; there will always be clients who want the safety of tradition and pedigree which smaller shops, whatever their individual accomplishments, simply cannot match. However, it is my firm belief that we are at the crest of a new wave in creative mentality, at the vanguard of a mental shift which is akin to the 1960s rise of big agencies and Madison Avenue. While I have written primarily about advertising, this shift can be found everywhere, as designers, illustrators, photographers, typographers, printers, strategists, everyone are all working collectively to push whatever boundaries they can. The generation who grew up playing video games now have the controls of the industry in their grasp, and the potential for what can happen as a result is enormous. While some may be terrified by the fragmentation of the traditional model, those who are exhilarated by it will not only seize it but create their own opportunities within this seismic shift.

It’s an exciting time to be in an industry where everyone has a voice.