anthony galvin

In Evan Davis’ provocative documentary Mind The Gap, he argues that a key attribute that makes London such a successful city is the way that a huge mass of people with diverse talents are able to combine to produce ever more effective and powerful alliances. This effect, known as agglomeration, is a key reasons for the success of start-up communities such as silicon roundabout.

Digital agencies increasingly require the effects of agglomeration to innovate on behalf of clients. Brands are looking to ‘innovate to differentiate’, working with agency partners on ever more complex campaigns, co-creating connected products or pushing the web through responsive builds and smarter mobile development.

These kinds of briefs require an agency to line up diverse teams, with previously ‘non-standard’ skill sets. This isn’t just a production problem. The ‘mad men era’ copywriter+visual creative team isn’t an atomic unit in the world of prototyping, hardware hacking and auto-scaling cloud based solutions. Small project teams need to be comprised of specialists from a wide range of disciplines who quickly need to form productive teams. These teams need to live in the medium. Presenting ‘mobile first’ creative in a PSD is clear warning sign for agencies and clients.

So how do agencies find a way to crunch together multi-discipline teams at short notice. The 3 martini lunch era is a distant relic, and ever more efficient agency businesses are loath to run ‘a large bench’ of specialists. Conversely keeping control of freelance costs exerts financial pressure in the opposite direction. Staffing an effective and innovative team in 2014 is a challenge.

One strategy is to develop a t-shaped skills culture, where people continue to have a strong specialism (and craft) but also have a wide exposure to complementary skills. An agency of designers who code and hardware hacking project managers.

Agency frogger is seen as a threat to business continuity for agencies, but recruiting talent who have been exposed to a wider variety of projects and environments is a potential shortcut to a more diverse and flexible team. Encouraging staff to share, talk and present at events inside and outside of the industry is another way of exposing teams to external influences.

This isn’t an easy problem, but it is one that agencies need to solve to avoid producing out of date, commoditized work that is no longer effective. In many ways the type of skills required are the same, but the tools and landscape have changed. A digital agency that continues to show copy in Word and present ideas using PDFs is already suffering from having the wrong teams in place. The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.