The New Wave ~ SICKDOGWOLFMAN
The New Wave is Campaign Brief’s Q&A series spotlighting the next generation of independent creative companies and exploring how the indie model is evolving. From structure and speed to culture and capability, we unpack where these businesses are finding their edge and what’s driving client decisions today. Next up is SICKDOGWOLFMAN.
1. Give us the elevator pitch – who are you and what do you do?
We’re SICKDOGWOLFMAN, an independent advertising and design agency. We believe in the complex art of simplicity. In an increasingly noisy world, simplicity is what stands out, sells, and scales. It’s the hardest thing to achieve, and what we strive for with each and every project.
2. Are indies still challengers, or have they become the norm?
In terms of volume, indies might be becoming the ‘norm’, but more importantly they have greater capacity to challenge the ‘norms’ of the industry due to their ownership structure.
There are more indies popping up every day, and it’s great to see other people taking control of their destinies and creating something of their own. At the same time, the Howatson’s, Special’s, and Thinkerbell’s of the world are now rivalling holdco’s in size, and because of their independence, are able to make creative and financial decisions that aren’t beholden to a global head office. At that size, however, the question soon becomes, as the infamous Jay Chiat put it, “How big can we get before we get bad?”
3. What’s your unfair advantage over the networks today?
Longevity and consistency. At the moment, there’s a merry-go-round of senior leaders joining and exiting networks and larger indies. The benefit of being founder-led is that we are making decisions not for our personal careers or award shelves but for the long-term benefit of our client partners and our business.
We don’t have a ‘next job/title’ to think about, this is our last job, so we’re more focused on making our clients famous and getting them promoted. This is beneficial in building ongoing relationships because clients can put trust and belief in the people working on their business now and into the future, rather than seeing a different set of faces in every meeting. And that those faces have serious skin in the game. The outcome of the work genuinely matters.
4. How are you using AI to compete above your weight?
Joanne Maciejewska famously said, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do laundry and dishes.”
We believe that we are the best at what we do and can, and have, gone toe-to-toe with anyone out there. We’ve been using AI for years now. Automating the smaller, menial time consuming tasks gives us more time to commit to solving problems and developing strategy and creative for clients. And in terms of strategy and creative, we now get to answers a hell of a lot faster.
The more space we can create for the human stuff, the thinking, the experimenting, the pushing at the edges of possibility, the better we can outcompete larger agencies. We’ve had our best years as an agency in what has been described as the toughest environment in memory. A lot of big agencies are talking about ‘restructuring’ and ‘redefining’ and ‘recalibrating’, but we haven’t slowed down at all, we’re simply moving faster and faster and making even more work.
5. What kind of clients are choosing indies right now – and why?
We don’t think there’s a particular ‘kind’ of client but there are some common themes. We are winning a lot of business from networks and against networks. And also from other indies that perhaps fell into a bit of a state of autopilot. The word ‘refreshing’ has been used a lot.
The people in the pitch and the tissue sessions are the same people working on the business. Clients appreciate having a direct line to be able to have frank conversations about the work, the challenges and obstacles, and knowing that information is actually being delivered to those responsible for solving the problem. And they appreciate being challenged in the right ways. If a business is up for pitch, then it means not everything is rosy. So sometimes you have to respectfully dig into what hasn’t been working. This stuff shouldn’t be so refreshingly rare, but it appears to be so.
6. What’s next – growth, staying lean, or something else?
We don’t think we necessarily look at ‘growth’ as a headcount thing anymore. While we have grown to our biggest size in regards to people, it’s never been the ambition. We look to grow in the areas that matter. Grow in dependability and importance to our client partners, grow in points of influence across their business, grow in the scale of impact through the work we produce. If you remain focused on that, then any subsequent growth in profit and people will follow suit.
Check out the other New Wave Q&As below:
Read Kill Boring Dead’s Q&A here
Read Oblong Creative’s Q&A here
Read The Many Australia’s Q&A here
Read Bureau of Everything’s Q&A here
Read Art of the Possible ANZ’s Q&A here
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