When I very first started this newsletter/blog, I opened with this quote from Banksy.

“The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people … Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”

It’s a backhanded compliment that carries a lot of truth. I’ve worked in, and been a part of running, creative agencies for some time now. And I agree with the gist of the comment. The amount of sheer untapped talent sitting around in creative departments mocking up decks and web banners and being told how to create and craft by people who can’t is absolutely astronomical. But as I did in my very first post, I still see this not only as wastage but more so sheer potential still begging to be harnessed.

‘Creative agencies’ are the latest thing to be thrown on the pile of carrion by professional thinkpiecers and LinkedIn edgelords. (Along with TV, out of home, photographers, Hollywood, writers, long format, film, and all other not dead things they’ve been saying are dead for 20 odd years now.)

It’s, as always, the same Monorail-peddling swindlers with magic tonics to sell that we’ve all seen before. Our agency, SICKDOGWOLFMAN, mostly deals in high level comms and design. We haven’t built our business on bottom funnel churn, the stuff we’ve all been told is ‘the future’ for a decade. Instead, we do work with care and craft, aka the stuff that’s ‘dead’, and focus on building ongoing relationships with our client partners. We’ve just had a record year, grown in size, and moved to a larger office. And launched our own brand. More on that in a tick.

Of course, it would be naive to not acknowledge that the industry is undergoing massive change. Agencies are collapsing left, right, and center. Immovable monoliths of the past bearing the most famous names in advertising history either wiped from the face of the Earth or carelessly smooshed together into amorphous blobs that hardly resemble their former selves. When self-described global ‘custodians of brands’ can’t even manage their own, the warning sirens for marketers should be ringing.

The question that still looms large, though, isn’t a new one. Banksy’s lament is much the same. What to do with all this talent? Whether the future of commercial creativity is in-housing, independents, freelancers/consultants, or more dystopian global mergers - creativity is still the one major differentiator for brands to outmuscle their competitors beyond pure weight of spend.

So, in a world telling creative agencies that we’re all now replaceable, overpriced, and ‘dead’, how do we continue to find new ways to prove our value?

Creative agency.

The people that have built the world’s best brands, and initiated all the ACTUAL creative leaps being copied, templated, and replicated by internal teams, and driven all the standards being used to define research mechanics, and created the databanks being ripped off by AI - are all still here, waiting to be utilised. Technology has been rapidly changing for 100 years. Pre and post-AI, brands have always needed to harness new, fresh, thinking to break through the slop of the day - and that’s why the phones of the dead inevitably keep ringing.

So, perhaps then, the ‘death of the creative agency’ is what will usher in the re-birth of ‘creative agency’. Maybe agencies will start living up to that word and take it back. Maybe they’ll start some things of their own.

A couple of weeks ago we launched SLATHER. Our own SPF brand. Born from the stark truth that Australian is no.1 in the world for skin cancer, with 2 out of 3 of us to be diagnosed in our lifetimes. And despite this, fewer than 3 in 10 Australians use sunscreen regularly, behind even countries like Norway and Denmark per capita. And making up these numbers - it’s mostly men.

When you look at the marketing in the category what you’ll mostly find is decades of either clinical/pharmaceutical messaging or female and family-skewed creative. Beaches. Pools. Vacations. Barely a whiff of messaging aimed at those who spend more time working and playing in the baking sun 365 days a year - men. When you take into account the aforementioned statistics, we can only really consider that a failure in communication.

So we decided to start a new conversation ourselves. It’s a massive undertaking. Beyond doing all the design and comms, there’s formulating a product, packaging, legal approvals, distribution, everything. We’re the client now. But SLATHER was still born from what we do best. Problem solve.

We’re only two weeks in, so there’s no guarantee that any of this will be a success, but it’s allowed us to do things on our terms and the learnings that will come from it can go back into everything else we do. We can try things others won’t. Leverage insights others can’t see. Showcase thinking others can’t comprehend. And glean a deeper understanding of what our clients are navigating in their day-to-day beyond just making ads.

So far, the response has been really positive. 5 or 6 high profile design publications have picked it up. Work of the week in Little Black Book. We’re going on podcasts. Creatives and marketers have contacted us wanting to interact with the brand. Larger brands have reached out enquiring on partnerships. There’s already resonance in the look, feel, and tone of the brand.

It’s a huge outlay, sure, in time and money, but it might open up new veins that otherwise can’t be accessed by only spinning around in the hamster wheel waiting to solve other brand’s problems.

And I think we’ll see more of this moving forward. Creative agencies, and creative individuals, doing their own thing.

A shift from creative agencies towards creative agency.

And I’m all here for it.

Unashamedly, we’d love everyone to join us on this journey. So give slather.com.au a peek and @slatherspf a follow on the socials. There’s plenty more to come.