The idea behind Orkestra Alliance

The agency industry is complex. And a bit thankless. Compared to consultants, who can reuse the same materials for multiple clients, or professions where it’s accepted that budget estimates can be “flexible,” agencies have to do more every year with less time and money—without ever getting the budgets wrong, or else they’ll have to cover the difference. In fact, it may be the least appreciated category of professional services. In short, it’s a market where it seemed a bit crazy to bet our entire future. A good learning environment, yes. But perhaps not the best way to capitalize on those lessons.

That’s sort of the premise behind the idea of Orkestra Alliance: a division of the company where, for the past few years, we’ve been investing in several businesses that we then support—directly or indirectly—through marketing.

Because if we’re truly confident in the value we bring to these companies, why not bet on them? Why not diversify our risk by exposing ourselves to business models across different industries? Why not reduce our dependence on hourly work—which never made sense anyway?

Reasons Not to Do It

Let’s not be naive. There are excellent reasons not to do so.

First, agencies are “lucky” in that they don’t really depend on the impact of their work for the client. Because quality and effectiveness aren’t the same thing. Winning a creativity award without generating any positive results for the client is a classic story. Yes, the bar for quality is high. But the bar for effectiveness is even higher. So if agencies had always been paid based on effectiveness, there would be a lot fewer of them in the phone book.

It also requires a completely different mindset. When you become a stakeholder in the company you’re helping, you have a responsibility to respect the value of money. To ask yourself if all of this is truly useful. To admit that our own agency might not always be the best solution. Spending your own money is more painful than billing hours left and right to a repeat client. So we owe it to ourselves to provide justifications. “The team’s taste” isn’t an argument. Neither is the agency’s portfolio.

And for many, that’s just too much to handle.

Reasons to Do It

If art is your only interest, there are simpler ways to live. But if you’re looking to understand the true role of creativity in marketing and business, you could hardly ask for anything better. It’s a timeless lesson in clarity, efficiency, discipline, and humility—one that’s quite hard to emulate.

Your year-end results depend on the tangible impact of your work on the market. The bank account becomes the ultimate metric—objective and impartial. There’s no hiding behind a keynote speech. If your idea works, there will be no doubt. If not, there will be no excuses.

But our greatest discovery about the Alliance project is the closeness we’ve developed with entrepreneurs. Our new partners, with their respective areas of expertise—completely different from our own: restaurant operations, data engineering, chemistry, construction, aerospace, and more. We learn from their strengths. We’re impressed by the problems they have to solve. We’re challenged in so many ways. And we come away, in our view, much more relevant in our field.

What about the agency?

Athletes know it: progress comes from practice. And for us, service remains the best way to keep our teams sharp on their skates. But revenue diversification affords us a rare luxury: limiting ourselves to clients we’re confident we can help. Avoid disappointing customers we would have taken on just to pay the rent.

What we hadn’t anticipated was that Orkestra Alliance would enable us to be a better partner in two ways:

• by encouraging us to always consider the tangible impact of our work;
• by allowing us to choose the projects for which we’re capable of delivering results.

The wheel is turning, in fact. Less pressure, more relevance. More relevance… less pressure.

With so many bets on the table at once, it would be naive to think we’re out of the woods yet, and maybe one day we’ll look back and think we were crazy to have taken this on in the first place.

But given the current climate in the agency world, it almost seems like the only logical choice.