The Right Media Agency Shape; Hustle Plus Governance
This article was originally published on LinkedIn.
Since becoming part of the broader Mother clan, the person who often makes me rethink what I know is the wonderful Charlie McKittrick, Mother’s CSO. Though I can’t recall what we were talking about, Charlie, who is not prone to emotional outbursts but expresses important points with an impassioned tone said ‘In adland, we’ve lost our f**king hustle and that’s a f**king problem’.
This is both an accurate observation but also an input given we are building a media agency from scratch. The whole point is not to recreate the same problems. And regardless of what agencies say they sell, they have one asset; people. That means creating a culture of discipline that keeps knowledge as the agency’s value, is a very necessary founding principle. Especially as it grows beyond an initial scrappy crew of entrepreneurial folk. But where does hustle play a role?
Media is not hard. But today it is very complex. There’s a lot to know, many things to triangulate and some very deep holes to get buried in. Bullshit easily overwhelms the system if it’s allowed to thrive. Particularly as it is easier to hide in than finding the right answer.
Is it, therefore, better to foster a hustle mentality? Something that attracts people who are brilliant at something but then gives them the confidence and motivation to proactively add on things they haven’t touched before and just run with them. It feels like more of an 80% learn-it-as-you-go model with 20% tutoring and mentoring to make sure everyone doesn’t end up just making it all up.
Or do you lean into the last decade of media agency evolution and create something that is far more structured, with departments of go-to specialists and engineers that is primarily about having teams with certifications, who are excellent at largely one thing. This is a bit more like governance principles but there’s a case for it.
The challenge is that a media agency unsurprisingly needs both. But hustle and governance are biased to a spectrum of risk that exists in media. And motivating people to learn the right ways of developing knowledge is different at each end of these spectrums too.
Strategy and ideas live at the end of the spectrum where there is a high tolerance for risk from the person receiving them (the client). They are hypothetical scenarios or recommendations. They haven’t happened. But they need to be interesting, intelligent and compelling enough to commit to without having every last detail nailed down.
At this end of the spectrum, a little mental hustle helps. Being able to demonstrate why a particular problem is solved by a given strategy, where that lands in media, how that informs that shape of content and how the brand turns up, creates security for a client that you do indeed understand how this whole advertising thing works. Not just a piece of it. That ability to stitch things together comes from regular exposure and often the practice of varied crafts within adland — how empathy works, how creative ideas are developed, how media work collectively together, how to get insight from data etc.
At the other end of the spectrum live production or buying and optimizing media. This is where the rubber hits the road. Cash is being laid down and real expectations of outcomes are set. These are clear actions and the tolerance for risk is very low. Trust, deep knowledge and brutal accountability are key. It requires governance-type things that are not sexy; effective process management, multiple points of quality assurance testing and oversight.
As we grow and tackle this, it turns out Charlie is indeed right; even if the environment is there, finding people who feel comfortable enough to hustle has been way harder than building out the tight and rigorous governance end of the agency.
Our working hypothesis right now is that we have just mentally beaten the permission to do this out of people in adland. Psychologists call it fear of competency; people do one thing for a given period of time and then if you ask them to step outside of that thing, anxiety is created through fear of failing. Or maybe they just can’t be arsed. Either way, it’s an interesting people problem to tackle.
The solution has two roads and as we scale, we’ll get a better sense of which gets the fastest traction: We bring in people who have had more experience, kept their knowledge contemporary AND are prepared to do the work. But we also take young, fresh talent who are motivated (but mandated) to learn an ever-evolving curriculum so that their knowledge and their confidence spans.
These sound like simple things that already exist. But they don’t happen. Experience often drifts off into some BS management job, misaligned with existing craft skills and then develops the belief that they are above the work. Or young talent gets zero training and then scrambles to get one of those management jobs so they can just tell the next bunch of wide-eyed newbies to ‘work it out’ as they have no idea how to teach them what to do.
Fostering learning and meaningful progress need to be at the heart of a hustle culture and we seem to have let them wither.
Getting the governance bit right is a good place to start as that’s where clients’ dollars are at stake. But the opportunity in media is a creative one so finding and/or teaching folks to get comfortable with the mental hustle of swapping between analytical and creative thinking feels like an important one to solve for.
We’ll let you know how it goes.
If you have been thinking that there must be a way to do media differently, get in touch with us at hello@mediabymother.com
