As a teenager, seeing the Clash play live provided me with a life-changing experience. My friends and I were convinced that anything was possible. Music, fashion, society – everything could change because we were in it together.
Years later, and a touch wiser, I still passionately believe in the power of collective action to affect change. It’s partly why I helped to set up a new kind of advertising agency, centred around collaborative working practices.
A year and a half into our new venture and we are intently focused on the harsh realities of keeping pace with today’s changing media, driven as it is by constant innovations in tech, experience and content. This pace of innovation delivers a mountain of data, but extracting usable insights calls for exceptional skills.
Those special skills traditionally sat inside international communication agencies: the only ones who could afford the staff, software and time to crunch the numbers.
But now, with a sharing and collaborative culture baked into what we do, the barriers are gone. We recently carried out some amazing work with Argos that just wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago.
Deloitte – among many others – has reported on how the lure of flexible working is drawing the best thinkers away from traditional structured industries, of which advertising is definitely one.
Every advertising, marketing or agency startup, along with studying the latest fad in disruption theory, should also read about RMT trade union leader Bob Crow. The glory of what he did was not just the ability to inflict the occasional unexpected walk to work on us, but the hope it gave disparate, unconnected small groups to collectively bargain for a better life.
Startups all too often end up becoming small businesses stuck in insular habits learnt at launch. We have strived to never default to in-house, but focus on bringing in the best experts we can find. This has meant a short-term hit in income but a massive boost in new business opportunities.
As Joe Strummer said: “The future is unwritten.” Tomorrow you should be planning the launch of your new business.
Philip Slade is strategy director at Path Worldwide
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