The ‘Creative Agency’ is dead. Long live the ‘Creative Squads’
In the new attention economy, the Creative Squad is coming after your bloated agency.
These Creative Squads will harness fluid power structures loosely defined as DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) and the financial security of cryptonetworks to create the speed and scale at pace with our new media landscape.
This is not 100 person agencies, not 15 person creative companies, this is a 3–4 person squad moving in ways unknown to ‘agency life’. There are no interns, no juniors, no account managers, no physical space, no fridges filled with clients products or agency lunches.
For clients, this will challenge the way they pay and value creative work.
Let’s look at how.
A squad in military terms is a small group commanded by a non-commissioned officer formed to complete a mission.
The Non-Commissioned Officer here means an officer who never went to an official military academy. In our Creative squads, it’s an evolution of a ‘traditional’ small consultancy leader, normally someone with an established career in agency life and a black book of contacts.
However, in this evolution, we could see the rise of commanders who will have no traditional ‘agency’ training at all. No 5 years at *insert big agency here*, never earnt their stripes or cut their teeth working their way up the ladder under an almighty creative director.
This new commander has moved horizontally through the ranks of culture. These are the creators, non-conformists, multi-specialists, self-taught developers, makers, community designers.
They’re not just working as a freelancer though, they’re part of a bigger story. A story of new liquid organisations.
DAOs
Decentralised (No central power authority) Autonomous (Runs through rules programmed on the blockchain known as ‘Smart Contracts’ for everyone to see and follow) Organisation… (Group of people working together)
We’re still in the early stages of defining this term and its use cases, but the focus of these organisations is to challenge traditional hierarchy structures to give autonomy and equity to the members within them.
A deep dive into a list of resources here gives a far better explanation than I can. Everything from how DAO’s can govern, making decisions at speed, to how they can operate from a legal standard through ‘smart agreements’.
Examples of DAOs in action move from VentureDAOs like MetaCartel funding projects (A group of people pooling capital to invest, like a decentralised venture studio) to Tokenised communities like Friends with Benefits (A group of people pooling ideas, discussions, potential in a discord server) DAOs can be any size, they’re just a group of people working towards a shared goal with a new framework. The DAO we’re currently seeing missing is a true CreatorDAO, see a full thread on DAO examples by Louis Albi here.
Could this be an agency that evolves into a DAO, or a new Creative DAO restructuring agency models?
Unlike traditional agencies, imagine Creative DAOs are not run by CEOs or Creative Directors with employees assigned to clients and accounts but instead they’re more like a collective, where everyone in them has a stake in the projects coming through.
Within these Creative DAOs, Squads thrive.
They come to life whenever our Creative DAO needs to get something done. The mission of the Creative Squad. It could be launching a new project for the DAO or client of the DAO, it could be any task at all you can imagine.
So the mission comes in and our non-commissioned commander mobilises a 3–4 group and proposes their squad for the mission. Then the DAO votes on which squads are right for the project, choosing the best one because when the Creative Squad wins, so does the wider Creative DAO.
Then once the mission/project has been completed the squad dematerialises, ready for the next one.
Even better…the Creative Squad gets paid on time.
The payout, timeline, deliverables are all built into smart contracts and money stored in limbo in a wallet, which is held where everyone can see, so if anything is contested, this new model allows the whole DAO to vote on whether the Client or Creative Squad is in the right.
‘Client’ not paying? Scopecreep? Does the Creative Squad fail to deliver? The DAO members stay truthful when deciding to protect the wider organisation and rules agreed on the smart contracts.
Then the money is released accordingly and instantly, not in a 30 or 60-day wait time like most invoices.
So in this model, it allows Creative Squads to move as fast as culture to bring to life new ideas, ads, innovations and projects which can be launched in days, or weeks not months. Without long waits for getting paid, we’ll even see our best commanders prowling through DAO’s for opportunities, and network effects bring the best Creative Squads to assemble in any way it wants, trading in and out the people needed for the job at hand.
So;
What if we created a PrDAO designed to get people talking…and to launch a new product we pulled from a global PR Squad in 4 different countries at once…none of them needing to have ever worked together before?
Or what if a DesignDAO launched Hackathons and ‘streamed’ Creative Squads on different parts of the project over a 24 hour period?
This evolution is all about experimentation, and it’s all to play for. Some Creative DAOs and Creative Squads will create symbiotic relationships, others will fail drastically. Of course, there will still be space for traditional agencies and physical immersive spaces for creativity.
But at the same time, this new model could create a far more dynamic and interesting journey into the creative industry for the next generation, without bloated agencies, hierarchical power structures and by granting equity at every level, even the junior.
So, DAOs + Creative Squads = Agency Killer?
These thoughts have been heavily influenced by an article on ‘Otherinternet’ called Squad Wealth, a conversation with Kian Bakhtiari, founder of The People and RaidGuide, a DAO doing exactly this for Web 3.
