Social At Iris — A ‘Hero’s Journey’
How to build a social function inside a big creative agency
TL;DR: building a proper social function in an existing agency is hard, but you can learn from our experience. If you want to get straight to the key learnings, go straight to Chapter Two, below.
Let me tell you a story… A story about an agency who have been on a quest.
Like all good quests, it centres on a character (Iris) who’s doing OK, but is restless. They feel like there’s something more out there, just beyond their grasp.
With a call to adventure, our hero enters a new, unfamiliar situation, overcomes trials and eventually gets what they wanted — albeit with a price to pay. Eventually they return back to their familiar environment, but are now changed in a fundamental way.
If that story sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the basis of 1,000s of myths, films, sitcoms, novels across history and cultures.
Brace yourself…
CHAPTER ONE — THE FORCE AWAKENS
We open on Southwark, a part of London historically known for bear-baiting and prostitution.
The natural home for a creative agency.
We zoom into a 60s brutalist concrete building where six founding partners, our heroes, have created a successful agency.
Founded in May 1999, the team see themselves as upstarts, not playing the big agency game. And sure enough the agency is a funny shape — full of characters you wouldn’t see in a classic ATL agency. Data analysts, consultants, CRM specialists, coders and film-makers.
In some ways it’s like pirate ship, full of a ragtag crew of misfits collected throughout the ship’s many voyages and skirmishes.
With a team of 400+ and clients like adidas, Shell, Barclaycard and Samsung now on board, the agency is doing well. But there’s one thing they just can’t seem to grasp hold of.
Social.
Which isn’t to say they hadn’t had successes in this space.
Indeed, some of the biggest hits of the agency were been social-first concepts like adidas ‘Haters’ or Domino’s ‘Gifeelings’, but those successes didn’t seem replicable or scalable.
In the case of Domino’s, success came through a tight team of very able, creative Jedis. They had broad skills — they could make as well as concept. And they knew how to beg, borrow and steal resources across the agency to get things done under the radar, working around the system rather than with it.
At the same time, outside of the agency a new threat was growing
New social agencies were springing up with the promise of magical social powers.
- Like Social Chain, which claimed the average age of their staff was 21. Social natives.
- Or We Are Social who were valued at $38m after only 5 years of being in business.
Whenever Iris tried to sell this model the agency ended up in a pickle. Costings and team sheets were created around traditional agency models and just didn’t work.
There were anecdotes of single posts costing thousands and taking weeks.
This was Iris’s call to adventure. Our invitation to step outside of our everyday work and processes and try something new.
It felt scary, but it also felt right.
Like Frodo leaving the Shire, like Luke Skywalker leaving Tatooine, like Harry Potter going to Hogwarts, this was our destiny.
And before you knew it, not only we were on our way but we had formed a gang around us.
These were not the regular agency types.
We had videographers, animators, designers writers, all of whom had their own centre of gravity, but could nevertheless also build strategy, concept, create and produce. They were our x-shaped X-Men.
We were into a strange new world where new challenges awaited.
CHAPTER TWO — INTO THE SPIDERVERSE
As in most of agency life, you throw yourself into the challenges you face and refine later. Ready-fire-aim.
In retrospect, it became clear that being a social team within a large creative agency meant there were actually three kinds of work. To manage each required us to reconfigure ourselves into different shapes.
1. Business-as-usual social — supports a clients’ business-as-usual objectives, requires a wealth of ideas and executions, to supply a month or a quarter’s worth of content
Way of working: team brainstorms to generate volume. Ideas that don’t usually need to be highly polished. Rapid production. Executed mostly within the social team.
2. Social-only big ideas — supports a bigger client objective. Executed like a traditional campaign but lives only or primarily in social channels. Social creator joins traditional creative team to work as a third leg to keep the ideas on track.
Way of working: True collaboration between the social team, creative, planning and account handling to get to a well-crafted ‘big idea’ that really works in social.
3. Multi-platform campaigns — supports a bigger client objective but lives across channels; social being just one arm
Way of working: Social team feed into main team, creating social ideas and ensuring that ideas are social-appropriate.
In this way, we were able to operate in three gears, depending on the project we were faced with. We were able to deliver social at the speed and cost of the internet, but also harness the impact and scale of traditional channels.
CHAPTER THREE — THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS
If you have similar challenges as our hero, this is where the story gets interesting. We reveal the special sauce, the nitty-gritty hidden secrets of how we found our way through the challenges that social presented us as an agency.
THE SEVEN CHALLENGES OF SOCIAL
Just as Perseus was able to kill Medusa without looking at her by seeing her reflection in a shield, and Odysseus avoided the temptation of the Sirens by tying himself to the ship’s mast, we too had our special tricks for overcoming our challenges.
1. The creative challenge
We certainly had many supporters, but often our work was often judged by the wrong criteria.
Some people weren’t social media natives, and would judge it against other output, like OOH or TVCs.
Some people, precisely because they do use social in their personal lives, thought it was easy to execute, without appreciating the craft that surrounds the channel.
Both of these approaches would result in output that was wrong. Often they would look like print ads squeezed into social formats or sometimes they would propose ideas that were explicitly against the rules and regulations of the channel.
Our solution was to get closer to the creative department.
We insisted Creative Directors had oversight of the social content on their accounts, and started to work much closer with creative teams. This made sure they felt involved but also see the value of our input.
At the same time, this helped us up our game. We pushed the level of craft in our own output, challenging ourselves to keep standards high, but without stopping the nimble process we had developed.
The result was much tighter integration, more likely to be called into briefing sessions and generally be a part of the flow of the agency. And collaboration with the creative department lead to much bigger, better ideas.
2. Learning hybrid teams have limits
Despite having a team that could operate across so many areas, even they have their limits. They may be X-shaped, but they’re not actually super human.
For example, the team was not brilliant at managing timings across a project, so we made sure that the producer assigned to that account was also across the social work stream.
Likewise, we had to work hard to communicate that our ‘creatives’ couldn’t simply replace traditional ones. While they could concept and storyboard, they weren’t best placed to write an end-line or scamp up an end frame, for instance.
3. Getting clients to understand the value of strategy
Undervaluing Strategy is a perennial issue with some clients.
Sometimes it’s because they don’t ‘get’ strategy, don’t want to pay for it or feel they already have it elsewhere. In our experience though, if a proper social strategy isn’t in place, or the strategy is too loose, it spells trouble.
Inevitably a decision is made, or the thinking behind some work questioned, and we don’t have a solid answer — at least nothing that is more than just instinct.
You need time at the beginning of a project to set the strategy and other parameters or guard rails. We insist on this now as we find it makes us more nimble in long run.
The more robust the strategy, the better the more specific the feedback, the better the work.
4. Stopping people measuring output by the inch
A few times we had clients who tried to measure the value they were by quantity of posts.
For the record, volume of posts ≠ value.
One well-constructed post a week can be far more valuable than 10 poor ones, especially in an era where social is essentially a pay-for-play game. “Sacrifice and over-commit” is the order of the day.
On one occasion, we were even up against another agency who were outputting around twice the amount of posts per day to one of their other Instagram accounts. But in the same space of time we generated double the amount of followers with our more focused approach.
(They had 125 posts over the period and gained 3,362 followers. We had 53 posts and 6,088 followers, since you’re asking).
Don’t be lured into a volume game (at least, not until the algorithm changes again).
5. Build flexibility into scopes at the outset
A related point to the previous one, but social is a space filled with constant change. By tying yourself too closely to a set number/types of output, you can back yourselves into a corner that doesn’t allow you to experiment with the new formats.
We now make sure we build 10–20% of our budgets to reactive/flex/special projects.
Sometimes the simplest way to do this is to call it an “innovation” budget, which is a phrasing clients recognise from Media agency ways of working.
6. Fight for the right to have kit
We started with nothing, but it soon became clear that if you’re making content regularly, it saves money and time to have the right kit.
It sounds like a simple point, but having the right lighting/cameras/sound equipment stops you from having to hire it.
Likewise, powerful computers with decent screens and the latest software don’t just live in the design department.
Nevertheless this was something we had to fight for.
Build this into your plan.
7. Building a strategic arsenal
Evangelism is key to building any new practice within an agency. We spent a lot of time explaining to clients and the rest of our business how social media works and our POV on various issues.
And like any good hero, having the right weapons at our disposal was critical:
- clarifies your approach/view on the world
- helps the team and beyond sing from the same hymn sheet
- short-cuts thinking time (you don’t have to rethink everything from first principles all the time)
We have an always-evolving strategic armoury. We introduce new concepts which then live or die through disuse. Sort of a Darwinian approach.
CHAPTER FOUR — RETURN OF THE KING
Drone shot over the skyline of the City of London. We pan in on an 1980s glass-and-marble building and dissolve to the interior. It’s a modern-looking, open-plan, glass-fronted office with a river view. All break-out areas, designer sofas, project cubes and agile working zones.
We’re not in Southwark anymore, Toto.
18 months in to the plan and we are doing really well, growing fast, gaining clients and growing income.
Indeed, we have grown to a size in which we were no longer a small under-the-radar team. We’re getting big and making waves.
‘Social’ channels have become an almost a ubiquitous feature on client briefs.
We have reached a tipping point:
- Previously we would be repurposing TVCs into social content. For the first time, our social content was being made into TVCs.
- Previously, we would secure social clients/briefs from the main agency. Now our social clients were turning into main agency clients.
In the early days it’s like a start-up, everyone does everything. But as any team grows, there is inevitably greater and greater specialisation of skills.
And inevitably, these start to become specialisms that can be imported back into the main agency.
It comes time for the the fellowship to separate.
Which is where we are today. We are in the process of re-integrating the skills back into our business — which is a whole other journey.
The agency we will be when that is done won’t be the agency we started as.
Iris will need people with very different skills to when we started down this road.
Designers will need to be able to concept, planners will need to know about media planning, creatives will need to understand the social mindset.
We will be the same old Iris, just different.
