The last thing I packed at Nemo was a laminated card that had been taped to the side of my monitor since 2014. Someone printed it as a joke during a rebrand pitch: WHAT IS THE ACTUAL PROBLEM. I peeled it off with a fingernail and it came away in two pieces.
Five and a half years. Four desks, three office moves, one flood in the basement conference room we will still be telling stories about in a decade. I loved that building and the people in it, which makes the next sentence harder to write than it looks.
I left anyway.
I did not leave because the work went bad. I left because I kept building things I never got to watch grow up.
Agency work gives you reps nobody else gets. In five years I touched a cider company, a credit union, two hospitals, a bike component manufacturer and a chain of dog daycares. That range is real training. You learn to find the actual problem fast because you are never in one category long enough to coast on familiarity.
Then you present the strategy, the room applauds, and you hand over a deck. Launch happens without you. Eighteen months later you see the brand in the wild and maybe half of what you wrote survived, and you will never know which half died in a budget meeting and which half died because it was simply wrong. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms and I have never once gotten a straight answer about it.
Brand side is the opposite trade. One brand, forever, and you have to live inside every compromise you approve. Slower. Narrower. Considerably less glamorous at parties. But you get to be there in month fourteen, when the positioning meets a supply chain problem and somebody has to decide what the brand actually means when meaning it costs money.
I want that. I have wanted it for about two years and spent most of that time telling myself the range was worth the handoff.
Then you present the strategy, the room applauds, and you hand over a deck.
None of this is a complaint about Nemo, which is a good shop full of people better at this than I am. It is a complaint about a business model, and the model is not going to change because one strategist got restless.
They sent me off at the karaoke bar in Southeast, the sticky one, the one where the host calls everyone baby whether or not he has met them before. I sang Total Eclipse of the Heart badly and with total commitment, as is my custom, and a junior designer sang it back better as a rebuttal. Thank you, all of you. I will be watching what you make from the other side of the table now.