A recent interview with a very nice guy called Aaron Bateman - he's a British copywriter that works at Danish Agency Advance. He's in the middle of a project - Agency Future - to research and develop a point of view on what the agency of the future might look like. He's been touring the world pulling together profiles on everyone from the likes of Wieden+Kennedy, BBH, Made by Many and Anomaly NY. He's presenting his findings here. His interview with me for Antidote is here (or below).
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Antidote is committed to ‘creating communication ideas that gain momentum in the real world’. It’s a principle that has manifested itself in brand-building successes such as Rapha’s pop-up cycle cafes in New York and London, and the massive-selling ‘Change the World for a Fiver‘ book for We Are What We Do.
I met with Managing Partner Henry Chilcott to learn more about the five-year-old agency and we followed up our meeting with an email exchange, which is what you see here.
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What was the thinking behind Antidote?
The exciting thing about our industry is that it exposes us to a multitude of different businesses and business models. You can learn a lot if you listen – it’s an industry that should feed and encourage curiosity and open-mindedness.
Yet, though no two business challenges are ever the same, the vast majority of solutions that come out of advertising agencies are advertising shaped. Given the talent in our industry, that’s just weird – brilliant strategic and creative minds dancing on a pinhead.
So Antidote was created to be an antidote to this approach. Of course advertising can be part of the answer but it’s never where we start. We find this allows our conversations with clients to be more real, more ambitious and more rewarding.
What did the founders feel was lacking in a traditional agency’s offering that they thought they could deliver?
Freedom to apply creative thinking to our client’s businesses, as opposed to simply their advertising.
Do you have beliefs or a philosophy? Can you outline it…
The more open-minded you are with your creativity, the more likely you’ll get to a breakthrough communications idea.
We also have a theory that the ability to buy audiences through paying a third party for media space has made agencies lazy. It’s why there’s so much average stuff out there. Therefore we always aim to create communications that can gain momentum in the real world – ie. stuff that people want in their lives.
What’s your take on agencies’ efforts to meet the challenges of the disruption brought about by the internet?
As with any communication, the challenge is to ensure we’re creating stuff for the right reasons – ie. truly answering (or creating) a consumer desire or need. The internet and the technology that connects us to it has opened a billion opportunities.
The problem is that (often) a low barrier to entry means few brands stop to consider properly when they should be there and, more importantly, in what form.
Strip it down and the internet serves a basic human desire – it connects us to stuff. But, it also offers us more control than ever before. So the challenge is to create ideas that people want to connect to, ideas that enhance lives.
Enhance is a good word – and one that’s often ignored – which is why there are so many ghost-town websites littering the web.
Made By Many have a great expression (which nicely sums up how the web should be used) – they ‘make stuff out of the internet’. I like the inference of this – they don’t place stuff on the internet (in the loose hope that people will interact) they harness its power, sometimes twisting it out of its frame, and create products and services that engage and excite. The success of any digital campaign is its ability to draw in, curate (and sometimes monetize) a community – to do this you need to build stuff that has value to that community.
How do you see Antidote evolving?
In two ways:
- More joint ventures – something we call The New IP – or ‘Intellectual Partnerships’ with our clients. Shared risk and shared reward will always lead to a more balanced relationship.
- Scaling up what we already do whilst staying true to our philosophy (the toughest challenge we face as a business.)
What would you say differentiates you from other similar-sized agencies?
We have a philosophy and approach that we’ve stuck to. This means we can genuinely back it up through our body of work.
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There's a simple theory for why the majority of ads / communications in the world aren't very good. It's because we insulate them from the market's essential editor, the public, by taking shelter beneath the cashmere blanket of paid-for 3rd party media. As long as we rely on paying a third party to force our ideas upon the public, we'll exist in a bubble that accepts and perpetuates mediocrity. It's only when you take this blanket away, expose our ideas to the harsh elements of the real world that we truly feel the pressure to produce something brilliant. Because, in the real world, if things aren't brilliant, they tend to wither and die.
This is frightening but it's the same world in which the products and services we promote have to exist.
Paying a 3rd party to host your piece of communication can have many benefits (amplification, reach, targeting etc) but it can also make us lazy. Perhaps we need to spend more time thinking like we don't have a media budget to force us to build things that have true value in the real world. As technology makes editing the stuff we don't like out of our lives easier and easier this could quickly shift from an ideology to a necessity.
The Viral Factory is a communications company that has this thinking in its blood. They create a product that lives in the real world (well technically speaking the virtual-real-world of the internet), a product that, if it doesn't cut it, disappears without trace. Its effectiveness (or otherwise) is there for everyone to see. It has to earn every single eyeball. Imagine exposing TV ads to the same scrutiny. The Viral Factory faces this reality every day which can only make their product better (backed up by the fact that their collective works have recently generated their billionth view). 1 billion actively chosen views. A world of difference to 1 billion forced views.
My Agency has recently built a 'pop-up' experience for Rapha - a premium cycle clothing brand. We built 'Rapha Cycle Clubs' in London and New York - part cafe, part screening room, part retail, part gallery space. If people didn't like them then no one would have visited. If no one had visited they would have shut down as a failure. When you can't buy your audience, there's nowhere to hide, and so you are far more likely to create something relevant, motivating, exciting and magnetic. (They were such a success we're taking them to 5 new locations next year)
Wieden+Kennedy's Write The Future campaign is a great example of a concept with a high profile paid 3rd party (TV) component but which didn't depend on that component for survical. TV served to amplify a brilliant idea that was already taking hold in the pop culture of the real world. Any campaign with a robust social media ambition has to be conceived in this way if it's going to succeed. Because if an idea's to become social it needs to be wanted.
So next brief you get, cast away that cashmere blanket and challenge yourself to create something that could survive in the real world; you might just create something that people will be prepared to queue around the block for.
Nice little post on the importance of noticing here from Caprice Yu
Noticing the world around us is important – it’s this continual bombardment of stimulus that lights up our minds and triggers new insights and ideas.
Problem is, when you can get so much bite sized stim in the palm of your hand through your impossibly connected smart phones you can get lazy, transfixed by ‘the screens’ in your life.
In the last year or so I’m guilty of this – I’ve done less noticing of the world around us – just have to look at my blog – it takes effort to stop and take a look around. But that’s where life's moments of magic really happen.
Pic - On Seeing and Noticing by Alain de Botton
Google and Arcade Fire have created something pretty special - an interactive music video "The Wilderness Downtown". Built in HTML5, it's one of several 'Chrome experiments' that Google has created to show off the power of its increasingly-influential browser. Content sells technology.
Take a look here - and stick with it. I like a lot. (PS - won't work in IE)
My latest post on Alex Bogusky and John Winsor's brilliant Baked-in on the Antidote blog. Read here.
Antidote's latest creation launched in the East Village last night...