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Bowl Leader
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Additional Posts in Londoners in Advertising
Name the agency you hated working at. 🍿
Anonymous User
Bowl Leader
Why is the ad community in London so cliquey?
I’d like to get off this island now.
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It perpetuates that the most viable path is to come up through the same couple of ad schools where you partner up and are launched into the placement circuit as a set.
Which perpetuates the talent pool being mostly London-area and/or creatives of means who already know about advertising as a career option and can afford to go to those same couple of ad schools and subsequent placements.
And we continue to be surprised about the lack of diversity in creative departments. Of course some make it through in spite, meeting partners along the way, or flying solo, and moving to London with experience elsewhere…but…it’s uncommon.
It gets less common every year I think.
So how do we abolish the teams approach?
It’s not fair, it literally makes people’s lives miserable sometimes. Joint contracts aren’t fair, sometimes it sabotages one person’s career as another side could be slacking. Even finding a partner and a job is difficult.
Does anyone know why is this only in London btw? Doesn’t seem so common elsewhere.
Actually the scary thing is more and more places have started bringing it back. Australia has basically become a teams market and even in the US, you’re seeing more and more of it. The way it works in the US is slightly different because partners often have their own portfolios instead of a joint one and there are still a large population of agencies who don’t do it due to resourcing issues. The thing here is every department are familiar with working and hiring teams here. In the US, not everyone does it so some recruiters just don’t know how to hire them and hence, it’s not as big
It also creates a homogenous culture. Everyone wants to work with someone who is like they are. So if you're a little older, younger, blacker or just weirder looking, you'll struggle to find a partner.
The best partner I ever had was in Amsterdam. The agency just paired me up with her randomly. I would probably have never chosen to work with her.
When I chose a partner for myself in London, we both got fired after a year purely because our boss thought our partnership wasn't a good one.
Yeah, it f*ckin sucks
It’s really outdated and unfortunately there’s enough teams in the market to make agencies changing their ways of working redundant.
Agencies are leaving a lot of talent on the table.
The way creatives have to develop their craft, get a partner and get a job is costly and time consuming. It means agencies only hire a few types of people.