On brief

Advertising agencies, marketing studios and the freelancers around them: 339 000 advertising firms in Europe alone. What they all have in common is that they sell hours, and the hours worth selling are the ones spent on the idea.

The trouble is how few of those hours there are in a week. Before anyone can work on the idea, somebody has to turn the client's call into a brief, pull last month's numbers into a report, and chase the client for the feedback that has been missing for three weeks. None of that is the work, all of it is required. Agents are unusually good here. For example, turning an hour of call notes into a one-page brief. Drafting the monthly report so the account lead spends their hour on what the numbers mean. Drafting the reply to the client who has now asked twice, in the voice the agency actually uses.

That being said, an agency's name is on everything it ships. To that end, our embedding process puts the person at the end of every chain. For example, your agent drafts and never publishes. Everything it asserts is traceable back to the source it came from, so checking it is a matter of following a line rather than trusting a tone.

If you sell ideas by the hour, every hour an agent gives back is an hour for the idea. If you're interested in the advantages an agent can give your business, click here to let us know more about your business.