The worst possible time in the history of mankind to start an advertising agency. Right?

I’ve heard it everywhere. The agency model is dead, dead, dead. The internet is burbling through like a tsunami killing all in it’s path. Clients are hacking budgets. CMO’s don’t get any respect from their boards, so agencies can barely get a seat at the card table with the kids.

So why start new now?

Call it willful ignorance, naivete or psychotic delusion but I couldn’t possibly think of a better time to start an agency. There are business reasons of course. Unlike plastic or I suppose, other forms of surgery, I don’t need a government license. The actual running of the business is about as complicated as running a shoe repair hut in the mall. And much of the staff, at least the junior ones, are pretty inexpensive because they get to work downtown, wear nice clothes and can tell people in bars they work in “branding communications”. That, I’m told, has some social currency and can on occasion, with the aid of several $13 martinis(plus tip), get you laid.

But those aren’t the big reasons.

The real reason to start now is because the business is so profoundly changing. And that, my friends, means opportunity. For decades, in spite of some extraordinary creative, Canadian advertising campaigns have pretty well been done by rote. Why? Because everybody had the formula to success: Media departments would buy a lot of TV, supplement it with a sprinkling of things like newspaper or radio, mix and stir. Creatively, a TV spot was formulaic: an unusual opening, a bit of demo business with the product in the middle and ended with the logo and tagline. Everybody happy? Ok, let’s go for lunch.

But all that’s changed. Some changes happened at a glacial pace. Some, it seems, overnight. The proliferation of media has caused costs to skyrocket. That in turn caused advertisers to whittle down the number of brands they advertised just to get the same impact with the same target group. Remember how many beer brand there were on TV just 10 or 15 years ago? How many now? Nobody’s got enough money to saturate the market anymore. Except maybe Bell or Rogers.

And then there’s the (cue sinister music) internet. It’s all out there, it’s uncontrolled and most of it’s free. It’s making big ad agencies crazy. They’re learning how to work it, they’re learning how to make it effective but they can’t for the life of them figure out how to make any real money out of it.
So they try to ignore it. But they can't because even the card-carrying Luddites among their clients are waking up to it.
Up until a few years ago, clients could pretty well ignore the internet as a fringe phenomenon without any mass impact (all outrageous business media claims to the contrary). But now his daughter is spending 2 hours a night on Facebook, ripping off music on Limewire and not doing what she is supposed to—which is watching TV. And when she is watching The Hills, it’s been PVR’d so she’s seeing the commercials for about a nanosecond as she happily skips along. Uh oh. It’s easy to ignore the evidence on a media spreadsheet but not when it’s sitting on your couch.
All this is why advertising may actually become cool again. Why? Nobody knows where advertising’s going tomorrow but most are coming to the realization they have to take much greater risks to make it work today. You can’t just carpet bomb consumers with media anymore. What that means to me is this: greater risk means greater creative opportunity. Get noticed. Get people engaged. Get liked. Get famous. That’s what brands want. That’s what our industry wants. That’s what I want.

And you know what? It’s actually fun. About a year and a half ago, I wrote a three and a half minute horror movie for a VOIP client in San Francisco. The film ran online. We ran “trailers” for the film on The Daily Show and Fox News and the like. I never, ever thought I’d get an opportunity to do something like that. And given the various ad Nazis and censors it never would have run on television. It could only run online. And only because of the new landscape and a new need to embrace risk would a client ever approve an idea like that. I had the time of my life. The minimovie was good. The client got a big jump in subscribers. Their brand got great positive notoriety. And I got to write a supernatural slasher flick. Something I always wanted to do.

So I’ve started Wild Mouse. A small group of smart people naïve enough to believe they can make great things happen. I'll let you know how things go. Right now I have to go out and buy a stapler.