Advertising's Guns for Hire

As the ad industry continues to debate its place in the media landscape, the Glue Society sidesteps the issue to focus on creating content across all media

by Helen Walters

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Concern within traditional advertising agencies is reaching critical mass. Even as everyone within the industry acknowledges that the business of marketing is changing at warp speed, no one seems to have any idea where it's heading. And despite a report which put worldwide advertising expenditures for 2006 at $599.5 billion, up 5.3% since 2005, there's a fundamental problem, according to Robert Coen, the author of that report and senior vice-president, director of forecasting, at Universal McCann.

"New technology is affecting basic advertising strategies, and there is considerable confusion about what is happening in marketing communications," he writes. "The economic outlook for 2007 is not great, and if present cautiousness persists, the climate for U.S. advertising could get even worse…. There are plenty of reasons for pessimism…."

One thing is clear, while the agencies may have a problem, advertising itself is by no means dead. According to Coen's report, many U.S. corporations have enjoyed double-digit profits over the past five years, and they clearly still need marketing and branding help. It's just that the old order of things won't cut it any more. Or, as Kevin Roddy, executive creative director at Bartle Bogle Hegarty, New York, puts it, "The term 'advertising agency' will become obsolete fairly soon. The very definition of advertising is changing," he says.

The Creative Collective

As agencies struggle to come to terms with this new reality, a new business paradigm has been developing on the sidelines. A number of years ago, so-called "creative hot shops" sprang up to forge a different model of advertising. Led from London by the likes of Mother and St. Luke's and soon joined by agencies such as 180 and Strawberry Frog in Holland, these agencies regularly broke with the status quo to create integrated, cross-media campaigns (see BusinessWeek.com, 12/18/06, "Amsterdam's Red-Hot Ad Shops").

Now another type of company has emerged that pushes that idea even further. Exemplified by Sydney/New York-based creative collective, the Glue Society, these companies reject both the title "agency"—and the very idea of having retained clients. They're creative-content providers, pure and simple.

Ready and able to be employed by anyone who will have them (brands, agencies, even individuals) they work solely on a project-by-project basis. There's no long-term account management, no planning, no media buying. And yet as an entity, they're able to deliver more than the individual creative types (such as photographers or directors, for instance) historically commissioned by more traditional advertising.

Murdoch's Fault

Put simply, the Glue Society and its ilk are teams of ad-savvy, cross-media thinkers. As such, they're free to go wherever the budgets are, and can work on a wide range of projects. In the past year alone, the Glue Society has worked on projects that have included sculpture, graphic design, Web sites and viral campaigns, traditional TV advertising, print, short films, and even— in conjunction with BBH—a 60-minute TV show which was entirely sponsored by Axe and which was broadcast on MTV (see BusinessWeek.com, 4/24/06, "Bet You Can't TiVo Past This").

The Glue Society was formed in Sydney, Australia, in 1998 by Jonathan Kneebone and Gary Freedman, who were then working as a traditional art director/copywriter team at global ad giant Young & Rubicam. Branching out to form a startup company was really Rupert Murdoch's fault.

"We produced a book for News Limited," remembers Freedman, who moved to set up a New York City office mid-2005. "The idea was to persuade marketers and agencies that newspapers were an exciting medium, but we didn't want to create a series of print ads to say as much." Instead, they published a book which featured provocative designs by artists and designers wholly unconnected with advertising. It caused quite a stir.