Purveyor of the Good

An Open Letter To Ad Agency Powers That Be:

Your creative directors direct their people in fulfilling assignments, go to shoots, deal with agency issues as part of the management team, work on new business pitches, develop relationships with clients. Your human resource department handles personnel issues. Meanwhile, there’s an essential position, a critical function that sits unfilled right under your nose. It falls between the cracks of these other roles, at the same time overlapping them.

What is this position? I call it Purveyor of the Good. It’s a function that I’ve felt by its absence at every agency I’ve worked for in my freelance career. I have often been asked, after turning down an offer for full time work, just what job I would be willing to do full time at an ad agency. The only one I can think of is this one. And it doesn’t exist. Yet.

But it needs to, because ad agencies are changing, what with unheard of competitive pressure, constantly increasing client demand for accountability and expectations of great work in no time, the advent of interactivity and integration. Like any good organism, the CD/HR needs to adapt by dividing and thus multiplying. Management by mitosis.
Just what would this new person’s function be? To begin with, the Purveyor of the Good would nurture the emotional and intellectual infrastructure of your agency, centering on the Creative Department. He would be all about the culture, the standards, the morale, the pride, the personal and professional growth, the fun, the quality of working life, the ethics. Kind of like what the IT guys do for your network and the office manager does for office stuff, only this would be for the humans. Dealing with matters that affect how productive your staff is, how good the work is, how happy and feisty and humming the agency is, starting with the creatives.

Creative directors and human resource people attend to the immediate matters at hand, the specific, concrete projects and problems. They are stretched thin. They don’t have the time or the luxury of stepping back, taking it all in and reflecting on things. Getting the work done, and done well, takes all their time. And that’s okay. But important stuff, ineffable stuff, the stuff that ultimately matters most, is set aside, delayed or denied.

Jay Chiat asked the famous question,”How big can we get before we get bad?”

He asked that question because, historically, it seems inevitable that agencies lose something important as they grow. The quality of the work suffers. And they become less fun places to work.

The Purveyor of the Good could help prevent that loss, or reverse that process by being at the agency (not in meetings or at retreats, shoots, focus groups or at the client), walking the halls, open, available, an ally to all, ready to receive input, complaints, suggestions, with a keen sense of balance and antennae up, picking up vibes, taking pulses and generating positive energy -- in other words, purveying the Good.

Responsibilities would include: Inspirer, facilitator, buffer, improver, defuser, ombudsman, liaison, lip service exterminator, devil’s advocate, negativity negator, conscience, practice-what-you-preacher, advertising advocate, contrarian, vibrarian, voice of reason. The Purveyor of the Good would push/test/evolve the agency’s vision and philosophy, aid everyone in thinking ethically about the business of advertising, advocate risk, encourage communication and constant critical self-examination, engender harmonious relationships among creatives, as well as between creatives and account guys, while at the same time embracing and optimizing the inherently adversarial aspect of those relationships.

Many of these sound like functions of creative directors or human resource people. That’s my point. They used to be. But they can’t be any more. You know very well that no one currently at your agency can devote himself fully to this stuff. And yet it is only by having someone fully devoted to these matters that you can ensure they will be given the attention they so desperately need.

How do you justify the salary? It would be natural to assume that the Purveyor of the Good’s time isn’t billable, that it’s strictly an internal function. But why? Why couldn’t you bill at least some significant portion of his time to particular projects? All it would take is the courage to educate clients, to help them see the value in paying for his time.

The rest of his salary could be covered by splitting it between the creative department, account management and human resources.

How would you measure the Purveyor of the Good’s value or success? Give him six months or a year. See if he helps lower the rate of turnover. The savings in that area alone could justify his salary. See if you can make having a Purveyor of the Good an enticement to come work at your place. You need every edge you can find to recruit the best available talent. And finally, if he’s making a difference, you should just be able to tell.

Like with the The Mighty Mighty BossTones. They’re a great ska band from Boston, with eight members, including a guy who doesn’t sing, doesn’t play an instrument, doesn’t write songs. Yet he’s an integral part of every performance. So what does he do? He dances. Skanks, to be more specific. In a business suit. I can’t explain why it works, or how it works. But he makes a huge contribution.

Maybe what your agency needs is a skankin’ fool.