The Dendrocast

A new series from The Dendrocast team giving a voice to young, emerging leaders in the agency business.

Today's masterclass is with Cody Simmonds of Laundry Service.

Your ability to scale an agency will impact how you grow. Achieving scale influences your growth trajectory, which in turn impacts productivity and profitability.

But scaling your business while remaining profitable is uniquely challenging for advertising, marketing and public relations agencies. Right now, those challenges feel amplified because the agency business is experiencing enormous shifts in its underlying business model.

So how can agencies scale their business as the model is evolving? In a crowded marketplace with more and more "gig economy" consultants, does scale still matter?

Julie Colehour and Bryan Cohen have grown their social communications agency, C+C, from a start-up to a national player. In this episode, they talk about the challenges of growth, the lessons they've learned, and why they think scale still matters in the agency business.

Everyone seems to be talking about mindfulness. It has become a cultural phenomenon many business leaders now use to help overcome barriers to sustained growth. 

But can fast-paced, high-stress creative industries like advertising and public relations really operate as mindful businesses?

In this final episode of 2018, mindfulness consultant Jae Ellard talks about what exactly mindfulness is - and why agencies need to view mindfulness as a daily practice that can foster productivity, efficiency, and profitability. 

In the wake of the 2016 election, media agencies and advertisers are confronting a delicate question: How should the consultant class be allowed to use people's personal data to market what we think they want?

Many agencies and brands use our online footprints to track, engage, and influence everything we see. At times, there seems to be little difference between most agencies and the firms hauled before Congress in the aftermath of the recent Facebook scandal.

So, how should agencies be using Big Data? Where are the ethical traps? And how can we avoid crossing the emerging legal and moral fault lines?

In this episode, Boston College business professor Gerald Kane explains how agencies need to examine their role in creating demand for people's personal information - and how trust, addiction, and societal health factor into the debate over who's responsible for protecting our data.

Artificial intelligence used to be the stuff of science fiction. But without question, we are currently witnessing the birth of a new economy made possible only because of machine-based learning and problem solving.

Companies such as Amazon and Uber are being built around an AI-driven economic ecosystem that will propel us into a new Industrial Age. But how much will AI impact the advertising and public relations business?

In this episode, we explore how media, people, creativity, and artificial intelligence are merging.

Tim Weinheimer of The Weinheimer Group explains why agencies need to be integrating AI into their business model - and how it will change everything from how we measure campaigns to how agencies design creative media.

If you work in advertising or the agency business right now, chances are you're somehow following the hilarious breaking news stories published by AdWeak.

A mix of The Onion and that industry trade with a similar-sounding name, AdWeak has become a social media phenomenon by posting satirical observations about the ad industry – mostly at the expense of the agency business.

Why are AdWeak's brutal truths about the agency world so funny we love to laugh at our own expense? In a word: truth. It has become the industry's daily dose of truth we hate to love.

So what does all of this say about the industry's ability – and willingness – to change? In this episode, we talk with AdWeak's editor (known to his followers as "Paul Taylor") about why he thinks laughing at ourselves may just be the key to saving our industry.

The agency world has a higher than average rate of people who confront career burnout. The hours. The demands. The hyper-reactive culture. It draws in amazingly talented minds who are also drawn to its unique chaos.

But then one day you wake up and just can't do it anymore.

Why do people at agencies burnout? And what should more agency leaders understand about how and why it happens?

Industry veteran Dave Burg wrote a widely-read article titled "I Quit My Job To Get My Life Back" in which he shared his story about walking away. In this episode, he talks about what led to that personal identity crisis, how he recovered, and what he learned starting over on his own terms.

Finding and keeping great people consistently ranks as one of the biggest challenges for every agency. Increasingly, the agency workforce is evolving their expectations of everything from the kind of work they want to do to the culture they want to work in.

Why is recruiting and retaining talent so hard for agencies? How is the competition for the best people changing as more brands build in-house teams? And what should agency leaders be doing differently to develop the right people for the right roles?

Listen as Angee Linsey, founder and managing director of Linsey Careers, talks about the common mistakes agencies make in hiring, managing, and mentoring talent. 

What makes a co-founder partnership successful? And why do so many of them fail?

Many agencies are started by business partners with a shared vision for what an agency can do. But somewhere between starting the agency and managing its success are a host of complex issues that make sustaining the partnership hard.

What are the most common mistakes agency co-founders make? And what guidelines should they set at the start of the relationship to help it survive through good times and bad?

Nick Herinckx is an executive coach who works with business leaders on everything from creating shared values to mitigating conflicts. He talks about how agency owners can succeed through the natural ups and downs of building and managing their business.

The role of the agency is changing. But why? And what is the agency of the future going to look like?

As client needs change in a hyper-reactive media landscape, many agencies are finding themselves ill-prepared to adapt their model to what brands need and how they need it. With the traditional "Agency of Record" relationship fading from view, where will agencies fit in a more fragmented ecosystem of consultants?

This episode unpacks the reasons why the agency business model is experiencing a disruption - from how agencies are traditionally structured to how they do the actual work.

Julie Bosack and Kari Olivier designed a new kind of agency, Jute Creative, because they realized the landscape was shifting. Listen as they talk about how they restructured the agency business model - and the challenges of growing in this new era of change.