'If you're a moving target how do you expect anyone to pin you down?': The downside of being a 'Jack of all Trades'
Its 7.30pm, you’ve had a long week in the ad agency and your chat is running low. Following the crowd, you end up in a very crammed pub in Soho. You recognise some of the faces in the drunk, ruddy jam, smeared across the toffee wood bar.
Are we looking at a future filled with 'Jacks of all Trades'?
You end up talking to someone from a production company. They are several drinks ahead of you and are slurring their words. On hearing that you work in an ad agency they proceed to tell you that you are on your way out, you are on the way to extinction, now is the era of the production company. They’re a creative director at a production company. They even have a department of creatives. Clients now go straight to them.
Bored by the waffle of someone who has no idea how the ignition process of good work happens, you politely slip away.
Next, you’re confronted by someone who works at a media agency. On hearing that you work in an ad agency they proceed to tell you that you are on your way out, that you are on the way to extinction, now is the era of the media agency. They’re creative director of a media agency. They even have a department of creatives. Clients now go straight to them.
It’s quite amazing just how far a little bit of face value understanding and a lucky bounce, go. One incremental success and some companies are changing their architecture. The introduction of creative departments into companies and agencies that don’t necessarily need them is like having a lovely BMW estate and welding on an outboard motor to the back…that drags along the road. You’ve ruined the BMW and rendered the outboard motor useless. Sure, on paper having a vehicle that can go on land and water sounds amazing. Hell yeah. The reality is a cumbersome wreck, fit for neither purpose.
The media landscape these days is a difficult place to navigate. It’s not a fixed landscape of rolling hills, but of enormous rolling waves, nothing staying the same from one second to the other. Like the painting, ‘Raft of the Medusa’. Except every time the raft disappears behind a wave it reappears seconds later as something different. ‘You see that raft? I mean bouncy castle? I mean small kitchenette? I mean telephone box? Etc.’.
It’s like when Amazon appeared on the scene selling books. Just books, its sole mantra was to be the largest book store in the world. Book shops up and down high streets shriveled up and closed down. Amazon then got a little tipsy on its own success and started to sell other things.
It then threw its glass against the wall and started to chug straight from the bottle as it started to sell everything. Two bottles of wine drunk it decided to sell content, TV and boxsets.
That’s when the Class A drugs came out and it decided it was a production company. Arguing with itself in the mirror, crying with a nose bleed, broken and brimming with regret, Amazon then decided to do the one thing that would cleanse and atone its intoxicated soul…open an actual shop on the high street. Wait? What? Are you fucking kidding me? After all that, you just wanted to open a fucking shop?
Choose what you want to do and offer a service. If you are a moving target how do you expect anyone to pin you down as a master of that one thing? You shape shifting, intangible as smoke, full service from the ground up agency you…
I’m all up for diversifying a business, but have one goal. Starbucks has done this really well. They have an enormous amount of diversity, adaptation and evolution within their business, but it’s all for one goal…a great cup of coffee. Would Starbucks coffee taste any better if they offered financial services or strived to be the world’s biggest content provider?
Magazines as production companies.
Production companies as ad agencies.
Websites as content providers.
Telephone providers as ticket touts and sports channels.
Is this the future? Bipolar as standard? No longer are startups interested in growing, they’re interested in evolving. Does this mean that we will be awash with Jacks of All Trades?
My advice to anyone starting up – over specialise, you’ll be the only ones.
Ross Neil is executive creative director at WCRS