PR Cavalry Founder Nigel Sarbutts recently penned an article for Influence magazine on a topic that has never been more important. The ‘doom loop of PR productivity and profit’ as he aptly labels it, is not only in motion, but on a downhill trajectory, accelerating, hurtling towards a crash. This analogy isn’t a whimsical anecdote, and nor is it hyperbole. This is about creative industries operating like a factory farm in a response to increasing economical pressures. Those feeling the effect are feeling whiplashed backwards, waiting for the return forwards but instead being pulled further and further back. Like an elastic band being pulled, taught, it either breaks or snaps back.
Unless the tension is released. That’s still in our control.
This isn’t about entitlement or ‘happiness’ metrics or keeping your internal pulse surveys high. This is about fostering creativity to keep people genuinely engaged and delivering great results to clients.
I remember a friend who worked in-house years ago telling me he was told to ‘step on the agency’s neck’. Obviously the point was to apply pressure, to keep the agency in a state of constant discomfort. However, I think the utter ridiculousness of this phrase sums up the issue; it’s like gluing someone’s feet to the floor and asking them to run.
As Nigel eloquently outlines, “Creativity, persuasion, relationship-building, strategic thinking aren’t processes that you can simply ‘Trello your way to perfection’. They require psychological safety, mental bandwidth and emotional energy.”
He describes the doom loop: “clients, themselves under pressure, demand greater ROI. Everyone is challenged to do more with less. Workloads intensify and the inevitable friction emerges. The everyday conflicts that take root when emotional capital is mined to exhaustion.”
Remaining confident in your approach in a sea of panic is not easy. But it’s the only way forward to foster an environment that nurtures the very skill which PR agencies are selling: strategic and creative thinking.
Saying no is a superpower
Trying to please everyone is fuel that keeps the doom cycle in motion. As the poet Anne Sexton says ‘“My words will either attract a strong mind or offend a weak one.” PR agencies who advise on strategy, whose own strategy seems to ‘say yes to everyone, go after everything, and never say no to a client’ are clearly only literate in ways to burnout your staff and kill your growth.
In an AI-era, it pays to remember you’re human
The hyper fixation on tools and processes as a way to maximise productivity and finesse operations reminds me of Morgan Housel’s book ‘The Psychology of Money’. Housel outlines the idea that any financial model which ignores our emotional relationship with money and habits is one doomed to fail. The same could be said for the way an agency operates.
A few years ago in a piece I wrote about ‘mind, body and the metaverse’ (oh, aren’t we supposed to be living in the metaverse by now?), where I explored the relationship between creativity and productivity.
“Creativity is a buzzword often erroneously referred to as a hard skill that can be gained with experience, but creativity is a process – the start of which begins unnoticed, in the pauses between tasks, in those moments we let our minds – dare I say – be idle. Do nothing. Human beings are innately curious, playful; we simply deny this practice to ourselves. Playing is good for business. In Shonda Rhimes’ Ted Talk ‘My Year of Saying Yes’ she describes what happened when she said yes to more play: “I said yes to less work and more play and somehow I still run my world. My brain is more global, my campfires still burn. The more I play the happier I am and the happier my kids are. The more I play the more I feel like a good mother. The more I play the freer my mind becomes. The more I play the better I work…. Creativity thrives when we allow the mind to wander, to explore beyond the realms of day-to-day responsibilities, obligations.
We can’t ‘do’ our way towards thinking
Instead of looking to tech as a solution to enhance creativity – as if it’s a skill that can be switched on and off for optimum ROI – we need to radically ‘think outside the box’ and really ‘do some blue sky thinking’. And it may surprise you to know that the original thinkers and creatives who really ‘had their ducks in a ‘row’ were yogis. Yes, those well-known capitalist growth marketers.
They believe that to invite your mind to explore new ideas, to come to profound realisations, you have to clear your mind. In The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, ‘yoga citta vritti nirodha’ roughly translates to “yoga stops, or stills, the mind’s fluctuations.” Yoga asanas and breathing exercises prepare the body for meditation, a practice of stillness. What the western world popularised as ‘mindfulness’, yogis had been practicing for thousands of years. And it’s in this practice of letting go of the mind’s fluctuations that we make room for fresh ideas, for realisations. We can’t ‘do’ our way towards thinking.
But what would be put on our time sheets? Is ‘doing nothing’ billable? Reconciling the antithesis of the modern definition of productivity with the mental and physical environment for creativity is not an easy task. But the solution is doable, and realistic. In between an ancient book written around 2000 years ago and the next Cannes festival sits a level of nuance.
Saying no doesn’t have to sound like a denial, or a defence. Keeping clients on track with what’s important to help meet their business goals, redirecting attention to why they hired you, and setting boundaries around availability all speak of confidence in your skills as creatives.
Space to think isn’t carved out in time sheets, it’s grown from a culture of fair and sensible boundaries, an account matrix with flex inbuilt and leadership that invites different approaches and fresh thinking. You can outsource your desk research to AI, but it can’t replace lived experience and real world knowledge that can marry campaign ROI with empathy.