Owning Up at the Small Agency Conference
The Ad Age Small Agency Conference is one of my very favorites. There aren’t many conferences dedicated to the wants and needs of small agency owners and the insights and motivation I get from this one energizes me both from a creative and a business point of view.
This year I was part of a panel of women agency leaders who were discussing “Owning up: The rise of female leaders and how to make your workplace more equitable.” Jean Freeman of Zambezi, Florencia (Flor) Leibaschoff of BeautifulBeast, Asmirh Davis of Majority talked with Jessica Wohl of Ad Age about why we started our agencies, what it means to be driving progress, uplifting equity, and creating the industry we know can change the world.
Considering that only 0.1% of creative agencies are owned by women (I need to put the zero in there because people usually read that as “only 1%”—10x what it actually is) this is a conversation that doesn’t happen enough.
I don’t have it enough.
With all the time I spend writing about women in advertising, women as consumers, women’s products, and women’s social taboos, I spend precious little writing about what it means to me to own my own agency. Why Erica Fite and I started it almost eleven years ago. And how we’re making it work.
First of all, when I entered the industry in the mid-nineties, there weren’t a ton of famous agencies with women’s names on the doors. Sure there were a couple of legends like Mary Wells Lawrence and…well…no one else really comes to mind. Even Linda Kaplan Thaler hadn’t started her agency yet. In fact, she was leading the creative department at Wells, Rich, Greene when I worked there. So it didn’t even occur to me that owning an agency would be in my future.
Fast-forward to 2011 when the 3% conference came about and pointed out that only 3% of creative directors were women. Erica and I were gobsmacked. Could that actually be true? Yes. And then we started thinking, where are the older female creative directors? What happens to them? Turns out, even if you can handle the punishing hours, cut-throat competitiveness, and boys club atmosphere, advertising was a young person’s game. We realized if we stuck it out in our big agency jobs we were going to be fired. It didn’t matter how good we were, what accounts we led, or who we had in our corners, eventually we’d be pushed out and scrambling for freelance as the full-time jobs evaporated (see above re: advertising being a young person’s game).
So as insane as it sounds, we realized that to have any semblance of control over our careers and financial security we needed to take matters into our own hands. We needed to quit our stable jobs (which we realized were actually a lot less stable than they looked) and start our own agency.
But the world didn’t need another “cool” agency that was going to do more of the same. What the world needed was an agency that worked for women—both within the industry and as consumers.
We wrestled with the idea of being a “women’s agency” quite a bit. See, the groups with women’s products at traditional agencies weren’t where the cool kids wanted to hang out. There was a lot more competition for jobs on beer than on tampons. And the work often took the easy way out, conforming to stereotypes and tropes rather than pushing the difficult conversations with clients and media gatekeepers. And this is actually the reason we decided to do it. Because there was so much room to do it differently, so much opportunity to make a change—for women (in the industry and as consumers) and for society at large.
We realized if we could remove the shame and stigma around women’s everyday life, if we could “normalize the normal” that we’d be able to make a meaningful difference to our clients’ bottom line, we’d attract amazing talent to our agency, and we’d be helping women feel seen, acknowledged, and respected.
Spoiler alert: it worked.
Next week I’ll write about how and why we’ve structured the agency the way have; what’s in it for the clients and what makes it work for us.
