Joint London

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: As Eric Ries once said…

Why does adland need a new creative agency?

[This originally appeared in Campaign magazine on 1st June 2012.]

As they prepare the launch of their business, Joint, Damon Collins and Richard Exon reveal why they are starting up and what they hope to achieve.

Damon Collins says…

There are very few business problems that can’t be solved by a room full of creative people.

Of course they need to be the right people.

And by creative people I’m referring to people who are creative, not simply the inhabitants of the creative department.

They need have a broad range of skills, from strategy to data to packaging design to social media to PR to SEO to mobile to production to project management to engineering to architecture to product design. (No one said it was going to be a small room!)

And I’m including the client in there too. Whether they realise it or not, the guys with the problem hold the key to unlock it. Ah, but are they creative? Well, the fact is that anyone in marketing today who doesn’t understand and appreciate creativity doesn’t keep their job long.

Of course they all need to be at the top of their game, but just being amazingly good at what they do and having creative DNA is nowhere near enough.

]To get the best out of each other they also need to be hard-wired to collaborate. Skill-hacking, joint ownership, face-to-face working in teams that include the client are the way great things get made. And with the often complex structures, both within a client’s organisation and externally between their marketing agencies, the ability to work well in partnership with multiple stakeholders is increasingly valuable. (This kind of agile development process isn’t unusual. Software developers have been working this way for decades.)

However, in order to do this, they need another quality, rare in traditional creative types: to be able to leave their ego outside the room. There is nothing more beautiful that humble genius; someone who gives without trying to score points. Equally, there’s nothing more unappealing than an ego running riot amongst a group of otherwise likeminded collaborators.

But that’s not all.

These creative people must be business oriented. Focused on results. Not just in it for the awards, but for what the awards (should) stand for: creative work that creates outstanding results.

They have to be obsessed with emerging technology. And understand how, with the release of each fresh platform, human behaviour is evolving alongside technology.

They have to be honest. With themselves: Knowing their limitations and when to seek help. With each other: Lies will decimate a business faster than any recession. With clients: The odour of bullshit can be smelled from miles away.

They have to be ambitious. Striving for greatness is our only hope of avoiding mediocrity.

They have to be tenacious. Creativity is a process. One that can take time to get results. The best solutions come from unfaltering devotion to the cause by those who get a kick out of not just lighting the blue touch-paper, but seeing projects through to their sparkling end.

They have to be inquisitive. If we stop learning we might as well give up.

They have to live like consumers. It’s hard to make a TV ad unless you’ve ever watched the TV. It’s impossible to create a social media campaign unless you immerse yourself in the social world.

They have to be courageous. Brave enough to ask awkward questions and admit when they don’t know something. Brave enough to venture into the unknown, to feel the fear of going out of their comfort zone, but embrace that feeling as something positive to learn from.

Finally, and most importantly, they have to be nice. Life’s too short to work with gits. And there are enough brilliant people out there who are brilliantly nice.

There are very few businesses that are filled with people like this.

We hope ours will be one of them.

Richard Exon says…

Starting a business represents an amazing opportunity. We get to take forward everything we love about advertising, communications and creativity and make it core to our offering.

Meanwhile, if something’s been bugging us for years, some apparently inevitable consequence of how the industry’s grown up over time, we can simply drop it.

Best of all, we are starting now. Today. Technologies, platforms and trends that were barely visible five years ago, two years ago or even last year are now part of everyday life.

And you can bet the next five years, ten years and beyond, will see yet more change.

So the challenge for today’s start-up is to build a company that has change hard-wired into it from birth. Whatever we think we need now, we’ll need something different next year. The right way of doing something in 2012 could well be entirely wrong by 2013. Exciting, isn’t it?

Scary, too.

Because life’s easier when everything seems fixed – fixed retainers, fixed costs, fixed assumptions. But we all know in our hearts that life is becoming more variable as each day goes by.

Whatever your inspiration – the disappearance of iconic brands like Kodak and The News of the World, political impossibilities like a Tory/Liberal coalition becoming reality, or the role social media can play in overthrowing despots – let’s agree we live in a variable age.

This is what makes starting-up now so exciting. Not just because it’s going to be fun, but because it feels like there’s never been a better time to offer clients a credible alternative to the holding companies and the network offices that dominate the UK advertising market.

As Damon states opposite, at Joint we believe that creativity is a process not a product, and so we aren’t intending simply to build a smaller version of the big agency factories.

Instead, we will start lean and stay lean.

If recent history in business the world over demonstrates one thing, it’s that you don’t need to be big to generate big ideas. You don’t need to be big to work with big brands. You don’t need to be big to compete with Big Advertising.

So we’ll be structuring ourselves around a core of world-class strategic and creative experts, matched with an appetite for unrestrained collaboration and partnership, and the know-how to make those partnerships real.

Hence the complimentary skill sets of the Joint founders.

The big question though is what’s in it for the clients?

There are two issues at play here, and both concern the challenges that today’s market place presents.

Firstly, all our clients are under pressure to respond to rising customer expectations. Everybody wants products and services that are faster, better quality and more competitively priced. Clients live with this pressure every day.

They have had to overhaul their operating models, change their budgeting processes and think differently about every element of their business. Including their agency relationships.

More than any thing they increasingly want to distinguish between how they pay for what they value most – our strategic and creative expertise – and how they pay for production, delivery and implementation.

Secondly, our clients increasingly need partners and partnerships that can shape shift quickly. Scale of operation and fixed methodologies are no longer the guarantees of success they once were. Big, fixed relationships risk in-built obsolescence as brands and business need to move quickly to keep up with today’s networked, tech-enabled consumer.

At its heart, Joint is in large part a response to these challenges.

We’ll offer lean, expert partnership. We’ll be free to innovate about how we charge for our services. We’ll have the appetite and opportunity to partner whichever individuals or companies best help us meet the clients’ objectives.

And we’re going to enjoy doing it.

Ex-RKCR/Y&R Duo Damon Collins and Richard Exon Open Joint London

[This article appeared in US publication AdAge]

UK Startup Took Long Time To Avoid Lawsuit From Former Employee WPP.

By: Emma Hall Published: May 31, 2012

London’s most hotly anticipated startup opens for business this week, when Damon Collins and Richard Exon, former executive creative director and CEO of RKCR/Y&R, launch Joint London.

Damon Collins, Richard Exon, Lori Meekin, Nik Upton

The suspense has been building partly because WPP Group, whose CEO Martin Sorrell is a stickler for enforcing employment contracts, required the pair to stay on the job for six months after they decided to leave last September. Then they had to wait a further three months to be free to launch Joint London on June 1.

The name was chosen to reflect the ethos of the agency, which they say is about delivering creative and strategic expertise from an agile, collaborative standpoint. Without the baggage of a big-agency set up, Mr. Collins and Mr. Exon hope to avoid any fixed views about solutions, and instead offer clients a range of services by joining up with other like-minded, independent businesses.

“For us there will be no barrier to partnership with other companies,” Mr. Exon said. “We will be able to work with anyone of any scale to get the right answer. Being lean gives you flexibility and the ability to shape-shift — we will be able to operate at a speed that is fit for purpose in today’s market.”

Mr. Collins and Mr. Exon are joined by Nik Upton, Mother London’s “head of all mothers” (an operations/impresario/project director role), and Lori Meekin, a former joint head of planning at RKCR/Y&R. All four are equity partners, with Mr. Collins and Mr. Exon owning a larger share of the business.

Mr. Collins and Mr. Exon teamed up in 2008 at RKCR/Y&R, boosting the London office of the WPP Group network into a creative and new-business powerhouse. Despite the recession, the agency shot up to the No. 3 slot in the ranking of U.K. agencies by billings compiled by Nielsen, from No. 7.

The duo took over at RKCR/Y&R from CEO James Murphy and ECD Ben Priest, who resigned in June 2007 to form their own agency — Adam & Eve — which they sold last week to Omnicom Group’s DDB Worldwide for an estimated $80 million.

Adam & Eve’s exit from the independent scene looks like good timing for Joint London. Mr. Exon said, “London is a good environment for startups in any industry. There’s a density of creative people and a generosity of spirit around new companies. History shows that clients are interested in buying talented experts in new companies if they make their case strongly enough.”

Mr. Collins established a reputation as a world-class creative while at RKCR/Y&R, in particular for work on the BBC, Lloyds TSB bank, and government fire safety and anti-knife crime campaigns. Entrepreneurialism runs in the family — Damon is the son of Ron Collins, a legendary art director and the “C” in WCRS (now part of the Engine Group), a leading London agency in the 1980s.

“Richard and I both wanted to start our own agencies, but we probably wouldn’t be doing it if we hadn’t met each other,” Damon Collins said. “I realized that what I needed was not just more creative people or more mates, but someone with a good business brain who has come across every business issue…and has a point of view and a way through that.”

Joint London will start out working from a friend’s offices in Europe’s biggest recording studio — the place where popular singer Adele recorded her global hit album “21.” They don’t have any clients yet.

Mr. Exon was quick to point out that being “lean” doesn’t mean “small.” He said, “Traditionally agencies have grown up to have huge production implementation and delivery resources, fronted by a tier of creative people and planners, who are in the minority. We want experts and original thinkers to be in the majority.”

By waiting until June 1 to open their agency, Mr. Exon and Mr. Collins avoided legal action by WPP. Their predecessors, Mr. Murphy and Mr. Priest, were less fortunate and were deemed by Mr. Sorrell to be in breach of their contract even before they opened Adam & Eve. He pursued them ruthlessly, and the case was settled only a week before it was due to be heard in London’s High Court.

During the last few months, Mr. Collins has been working with the BBC and RKCR/Y&R on the BBC’s Olympics coverage, even though he couldn’t be paid for his time while on “garden leave,” as the British refer to enforced time off between jobs to fulfill non-compete agreements.