Lev's Good Ideas #025: Agencies Need To Pay Superstar Talent Superstar prices
A self-serving good idea
The best web-designer with a focus on UX (user experience) is Soren Iverson: he’s got a modest following for satirical yet intuitive, logical, dream-logic.
Here, for example, is his pitch for credit card locks that integrate with unpaid taxes. It’s a joke, but it’s an interesting joke.
I do not know Soren but I think he’s a genius: and, more importantly, I think that genius is criminally undervalued.
Soren is somebody who posts these sorts of interesting ideas, beautifully designed, nearly every day. He does this as a joke while he works on leading products like CashApp.
Do you know how valuable a good idea, a good design is for an app? A product innovation in, say, FanDuel, could be worth tens of millions of dollars a year. Don’t you want someone with a well-earned, impossible to fake, passion and talent for hard skills?
Do you know how hard it is to be a UX App celebrity? The respect you'd get from creatives from giving respect to another?
The respect you’d get from your clients?
When someone shows this level of talent, passion, consistency and quality in any field, you should fight for them. A LeBron of any stripe is LeBron: besides their terrific individual output they elevate everyone around them.
One of my favorite shows is Mad Men, a show predictably about advertising, and operating on the high fantasy of: “what if you could buy your New York City apartment just from working at an ad agency?”
But, critically, the show hinges around the genius of Don Draper: besides his individual greatness, it is the myth of the man that produces tangible business within the show (clients come to Don Draper) and outside it (fans watch for Don Draper.)
We are people, and people respond well to people. It can be hard to personify a brand or a skill. So when the chance emerges naturally, you take it.
Or, to quote from a real advertising legend, David Ogilvy, and his book Confessions of an Advertising Man in 1963:
“Word got around that I was one of these rare birds, and it occurred to several of the big agencies that they should hire me, even if they had to take my whole agency to get me. In a period of three years I received such offers from J. Walter Thompson, McCannErickson, BBDO, Leo Burnett, and five other agencies. If it had occurred to any of them to woo me with gold, I would have succumbed. But they all made the mistake of assuming that I was more interested in “creative challenge,” whatever that may be.)”
Emphasis mine: no less than David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy, lamented that while agencies were capable of recognizing talent, they had a mental block about paying above and beyond for it.
Hiring David Ogilvy would have been more than worth it at ten times his rate. Not just for his considerable, exceptional talent but for a key principle: the more you pay for something, the more its worth.
Tautological? Sure. but not purely cynical.
Take an exceptional school teacher, a star. They make a low salary; let’s say the equivalent of $35 an hour. At a private prep school, $70. As a tutor, $200. As a consultant, $350 an hour, as a lecturer, $700.
Each time, it’s the same hour, the same person, and even the same content. But the higher the price goes, the more attention is paid, the more care is given, and the more worth is extracted–-even if they were “worth” the $35 an hour the public school paid them, they became worth more to whatever room they were placed in.
Talent is like a goldfish: it grows according to opportunities, and opportunities align closely (but not completely) with salary. I refer you up to Ogilvy’s quote: creative challenge has been a cliche for more than half a century. We enjoy it well, but we find it anywhere. It’s free coffee.
But back to the athletes: part of what propelled the NBA in its early days was that it led ahead of fan expectations. When it was a small league it introduced a then-record sum for a player named Wilt Chamberlain: he was the first NBA player to make $100,000, signing a $100,000-a-year contract for three seasons in 1965.
In 1965, the NBA was not the juggernaut we know today: it had only been making modest profits for ten years. But in creating a superstar narrative, with superstar pay, they elevated the league itself.
Wilt Chamberlain did more than earn his salary: his high salary made the news, provoked outrage, curiosity, interest and excitement.
His team became better. His team became national news. His team sold more tickets, won more games, and elevated itself and the league: not just thanks to his outstanding talent but on the back of the excitement his outrageous salary commanded.
In retrospect, of course, the salary wasn’t close to outrageous: it was a modest expense that yielded exponential gains. But to get there, a team had to make the call that one man wasn’t simply as good as another, and that the best way to advertise the fact was to put their money where their mouth was.
Wilt Chamberlain was great. But by paying for that greatness, the 76’ers created buy-in and trust around the media and fans. And that trust paid dividends.
In advertising, that trust matters. Signing a creative genius, advertising that genius, clearing the runway for that genius: well it matters too. Not just because of their individual talent (as great as Soren is, I don’t doubt that every mid-sized agency has a UX designer or two of equal talent and skill) but because valuing your talent, in a bold way, gets others to value your talent too.
And, as the agency, you get the markup, the contracts, the curiosity.
If, today, VML or VaynerMedia signed Soren Iverson for a 3 year / 1.2M contract for UX design, and spent another 50k making sure that story was well received, I have no doubt he would turn them a profit. Not just because of his talent, but because of the message being sent: that our agency values creative above all others, that we bring in the best of the best, and that you, our client, get to have them on.
I don’t doubt that Soren Iverson could make FanDuel a million dollars every year if they gave him 100 billable hours of analysis, creation and explanation. Personally, I think I could too––ambition and brilliance isn’t too uncommon in advertising.
But the only way to clear that runway, to get that interest, to make it possible for a creative to move mountains is to give the the respect and buy-in possible to create real change.
So: overpay your creatives. Sign them like athletes. Praise them, celebrate them, and profit by them handsomely.
It’s good for you. It’s good for them.
And, soon enough it will be good for me.