Understanding the mirage of doing creative work for big brands
When I was just starting out in branding I had a big dream of one day working for big clients on big projects with big budgets. I could point to a billboard and say “Success! We made that.” I wanted our work to have an impact and it felt like unless I was working with household names, that dream would be very hard to achieve. Fast-forward 13 years to today and that dream is a reality. The last time I drove into San Francisco I saw three billboards on the final westward stretch of highway 80 for projects I worked on. Problem is, these billboards are not exciting. In Marie Kondo parlance, they do notbring me joy. While I feel good about the relationships with these clients and believe the work we did really helped them, the bureaucratic hurdles of working with big brands tends to create an environment that blunts creativity with hoops, check boxes, and group-think.
So as I sit here wondering why achieving the goals of my early 20s has left me feeling somewhat empty, I want to take a look at my biggest issues with big projects and the best ways to mitigate or avoid them.
Bureaucracy is often the enemy of creativity. This is old news. Agencies know it and clients know it. Some of the people I know who are most allergic to bureaucracy work in big bureaucracies. Maybe they’re just trying to keep their enemies close by? I don’t know. Occasionally, smart companies see this happening and create structures to give creativity the space it needs: Xerox PARC, Google X, BMW Designworks, and Airbus A3 to name a few. But most big companies leave creative work to fend for itself alongside focus groups and quantitative marketing. Tons of great creative work has been undermined this way. No focus group will ever tell you to call an airline Virgin or a computer company Apple.
What are the main ways big companies make it hard for creative work to survive?
The main way is by packing the room with stakeholders. Because the real decision maker(s) often don’t have the time to be involved, big companies compensate by having a diverse range of people from different departments act as intermediaries, theoretically getting the creative work to a point where the decision maker(s) can weigh in. This creates a variety of social distortions. Stakeholders are left to guess what their higher ups might want and these projects move forward without decision maker buy-in. I’ve done projects where stakeholders like the work, get aligned, and then share with decision makers who hate everything. This is obviously a huge waste of everyone’s time. The structure incentivizes stakeholders being critical because if the higher-ups like the work, no problem, but if they don’t like the work, the stakeholders are often the ones blamed. It’s very difficult to predict how people will respond to creative work, even if you know them really well. We’ve seen this backfire more often than not.
There’s also the larger issue of group-think, or what we call the Ice Cream Principle at A Hundred Monkeys. Send 10 people to get ice cream but tell them they all have to agree on a flavor. It’s going to be chocolate or vanilla every time. Easy to agree on? Yes. Interesting? No. This is why large groups of people don’t make good creative decisions. Some big companies understand this and have small, empowered creative teams. Most do not and prefer to approach the uncomfortably subjective nature of creativity by making sure everyone can weigh in. This way, if it goes sideways, everyone was involved and no one’s left to be the scapegoat. It’s a defensive stance that eliminates the most interesting work.
Creative work is all about taking risks and big companies tend to overlook the risk of taking no risks at all (aka being staid and boring). In the old days people used to say “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” This is representative of how a lot of big companies work with agencies. They typically want to work with big agencies with solid reputations who do safe work. If they do somehow end up hiring a small agency, they’re already seen as taking a risk by working with you. This in turn puts pressure on you to deliver work that checks all the boxes and keeps everyone happy. Not a great foundation for work you can be proud of.
Another common problem in working with big companies is bad contracts. Big companies have armies of lawyers and vast resources. This gives them most of the leverage. Their agreements are drawn up to benefit them unconditionally. It’s hard to blame them for writing contracts with their own interests at heart but you, as a creative professional, need to make sure you aren’t taking a big risk by signing on the dotted line.
Let’s look at a few of items that can show up on these contracts and how they might cause problems:
Indemnity: This means you indemnify your client if any other company or individual comes after your client for the work you did. This makes sense for things like software or construction but has no place in creative contracts unless we’re talking about knowingly stealing work. At A Hundred Monkeys we do not sign agreements with indemnity clauses. Big companies have lawyers for a reason and if they sign off on the work, why should we hold on to that legal liability in perpetuity?
Non-promotion: This means you can’t publicize the work you do. It’s up to you if this is a deal breaker or not. By contrast, smaller companies will take all the promotion they can get and will usually help you with case studies, quotes and assets.
Ariba: Ariba is a procurement system made by SAP. They charge you to get paid. When clients use Ariba there isn’t really a way around it, so if you want to get paid for your work, you need to pay the middleman.
Net 60/Net 90: A lot of big companies have Net 60 or Net 90 payment terms meaning they pay you 60 or 90 days after receiving your invoice. This means you might not see a dollar until 90 days after a project is over. If you have good cash flow this isn’t a big deal but it’s also something you never have to deal with on smaller projects.
So why does everyone get excited about the prospect of these projects?
Money, sure, big companies have lots of money. They also potentially have a lot of work to send your way. These projects also present a potential path to visibility and credibility. So, nothing to sneeze at (also, don’t sneeze at anything right now). It’s clear why these projects are alluring.
So if you’re undeterred and still looking to land some big name clients, remember these two things:
Your work begets your work: The work you do is the work you can share. If people like the work you share, they’ll likely hire you to do more of it. If you’re showing boring work for big companies you will probably get hired to do more boring work for big companies. Only show work you’d want to do again.
Focus on the relationships: When we enjoy working with big clients, we enjoy it because of the relationships. If you can build strong relationships you’ll put yourself in the best possible place to do good work and lots of it.