New agency launches are always good for a bit of gossip, and lately there’s been lots to talk about. Cream, the brainchild of Leif Nielsen, former Young & Rubicam vice-president and group creative director, is the most recent shop to open under a big-agency CD. As an unabashed champion of the small, creativity-focused agency model, Nielsen says Cream will be about great work. The bottom line will come second.
It’s an oft-heard refrain among creatives who quit to start their own shop. But can these new agencies be viable businesses and remain true to their creativity-or-bust credos? Nielsen thinks he can. “I don’t want to grow big. I want to grow strong through creative output,” he says.
Big agencies, he continues, don’t focus on making good ads, but on “making a number to either London or New York.” At Y&R he saw the sizable creative staff split into smaller teams “to pretend like they were small agencies.” Ultimately, however, when head office executives flew to Toronto, Nielsen knew what the real focus was. “I never once saw a creative person flown in.”
Nielsen isn’t ignoring his bottom line altogether. To keep costs low, he’s relying on freelancers to service his five launch clients, including Andrew Peller Wines. It’s a model shared by John Farquhar, founder of Wild Mouse and former creative director at GJP Advertising. Wild Mouse launched this past summer with the Canadian Newspaper Association as its debut client. That relationship grew from Farquhar’s last independent effort, Cyclops, which he opened in 2003 and sold to GJP two years later.
There are success stories of ex-agency types making good with small startups. Clean Sheet Communications launched in 2006 with Neil McOstrich and Catherine Franks at the helm. Both are DDB ex-pats who partnered with Publicis on its Rogers account. Soon after, Clean Sheet went its own way and landed work with Knorr and Chrysler, and was recently named agency of record for New Balance. It maintains a minimum full-time staff and relies on contract employees on a project basis.
But Clean Sheet’s raison d’être is a bit more pragmatic–it seeks to provide business solutions across all marketing disciplines as opposed to Cream’s “creativity above all else” approach. Franks says she stresses the collaborative elements of creativity to her clients. “It’s not ‘look what I’ve done.’ It’s ‘look what we were a part of.’ “
