My first Monday at the new place, the office manager handed me a badge, a laptop, and a mug with the agency mark on it, and then apologized because the espresso machine was broken. I have started at four agencies now. The espresso machine is always broken. I have decided this is the closest thing our industry has to a founding myth.
People kept asking whether it was different. It is and it is not, and the honest answer took me a few weeks to assemble.
Here is what did not change. The pitch process is still theatrical. Scope still creeps on Thursdays. Somebody still says we should socialize the deck and nobody stops them. Clients still ask for strategy and buy execution. The timeline is still built backward from a date somebody promised on a call I was not on.
Agencies are not that different from each other. Teams are wildly different from each other, and the team is the thing you actually work inside.
Here is what did change, and it is smaller and more specific than anything I could have found on a careers page. The strategist next to me reads the research before the kickoff instead of during it. Our creative director says I do not understand this yet in a room full of clients, out loud, without flinching. When a project goes sideways, the first meeting is about the work and not about who is going to be named in the recap email.
That is it. That is the whole delta. It sounds like nothing written down and it changes every single hour of the week.
So when people ask me whether they should leave, I have stopped answering the question they asked. The useful question is not whether the new agency is better. Every agency deck describes the same agency: nimble, insight-driven, uniquely collaborative, allergic to the word traditional. The useful question is who exactly will be in the room with you on a bad Tuesday, whether you have met them, and whether anyone in the process told you something unflattering about the place. If nobody did, that is the finding.
Every agency deck describes the same agency.
Two weeks in, four of them came to karaoke with me in Southeast, the sticky-floored place where the host calls everybody baby. Our art director sang Total Eclipse of the Heart at full commitment and missed most of it. I sang badly, as is my practice. I knew by the second chorus that I had made the right call, which is not a data point I can put in a deck.