SMALL IS HUMAN.

Not everything you’ve heard about advertising is true.

Most advertising people are very, very nice and very, very brilliant. Really.

But.

Advertising is indeed a ruthless business.

This isn’t due to the people in it, but due to the nature of advertising itself, in which each agency is (an oft-quoted) “three phone calls away from bankruptcy.”

What this means is that three clients leaving a company in quick succession can mean the demise of that company.

As a whole, the industry has been in a state of contraction for decades. Every year is the hardest year to get a job in advertising ever. The business shrinks at the mere mention of a recession, an act of terrorism or a new device that finally frees people from adverts (TiVo, for example). In fact, “The End of Advertising” is spoken about so often that it becomes a familiar drone for anyone keeping up with the industry press.

Mostly, though, these articles aren’t really talking about the end of anything. More often, they actually mean the evolution of the business, perhaps into something unrecognizable, perhaps only into something involving more and more and more online.

In other words, talk of a shrinking business is a little misleading. The business isn’t shrinking. Instead, the way the business is defined is continually changing.

Those who don’t evolve don’t make it. It’s Darwinism for salespeople, with yesterday’s champion becoming today’s small flightless bird, smacked in the head by a bat with an Apple logo on the side.

This has consequences for human beings, for delicate measures of company health like morale. If you have to fire good people with every market fluctuation, it becomes very easy to turn your company into a revolving door. Staff don’t stay long because they’re afraid of being made redundant, and even the few longtermers don’t feel much in the way of loyalty (for the same reason). So nobody grows, nobody coheres, nobody fights to make things better. Ultimately, nobody cares.

In our experience, staying small correlates with being nice to people. And being nice to people is as essential as ensuring that credit and debit balance.