A friend who still works agency side sent me a photo last week: the office kegerator, alone in an empty kitchen, with a sticky note on the tap that said "drink me before I go flat." Three weeks into everyone working from home and nobody had. The building is dark. The beer is a liability now.
She meant it as a joke. I have been thinking about it every day since.
Because that kegerator was the whole pitch. It was in the recruiting deck. It was on the office tour. It was the thing the founder pointed at when a candidate asked what it was like to work there. The office closed, and it turned out to be furniture.
Culture is whatever survives the removal of the perks, and most agencies have never once had to find out.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms, and the tell is always the same. Ask an agency to describe its culture and you get an inventory. Cold brew on tap. Dogs allowed. Ping pong. Summer Fridays that quietly stop happening in July. Ask that same agency to describe a decision its culture made, and the room goes quiet.
Here is the part that gets lost. Perks are a compensation strategy wearing a culture costume. They are cheaper than salary, they photograph better than a raise, and they let a shop avoid the three questions that actually define the place.
One. How work gets assigned when the schedule is already full. Two. What happens to the junior who says the client's idea is bad. Three. Who gets named in the recap email when the thing wins.
None of those cost money. All of them are harder than buying a kegerator.
Right now every agency in the country is running this experiment whether it wanted to or not. The office is gone. The snacks are gone. What is left is the calendar, the Slack channel, and how your creative director talks to you at nine at night when the deck is not working. Some shops are discovering they had a culture. A lot are discovering they had a kitchen.
Perks are a compensation strategy wearing a culture costume.
If you run an agency and you are worried about morale this spring, resist the urge to mail everyone a branded blanket. Go look at who has worked three consecutive weekends and fix that quietly.
Truffles has claimed the arm of my desk chair for the duration and Barnaby has taken the better half of the couch. Neither of them has an opinion about agency culture. But the thing making this stretch survivable is not a perk, it is that the people I work with keep checking on each other without being asked. That would have worked in the office too. It just never got a photo in the recruiting deck.