The Sell: Common Ventures on disrupting the agency model

Rachael Micallef
By Rachael Micallef | 30 September 2015
 
Damian Damjanovski

This article first appeared in AdNews in print. Click here to subscribe to the AdNews magazine or read the iPad edition here.
Common Ventures is an agency built on a hunch and formed in a kitchen. When it opened its doors three years ago it was little more than its founders - Damian Damjanovski, Jane Burhop, Brian Merrifield and James Crawley – and an idea about the piece missing out of the agency puzzle. It was this that Damjavoski said made all four leave their safe, steady jobs at Ogilvy one Friday and show up at his one bedroom apartment on the Monday, “coming in as though we were still working”.

“We had our working backpacks and I opened up my dining table and laid out power cables,” Damjanovski says. “We sort of sat down the way you do in the morning - everyone had a coffee and their laptops and then we all just looked at each other and said ‘what are we doing’?”

Three years on, Common Ventures has graduated from the dining room, housing its 20-strong team in a large office space in Surry Hills after building a stack of industry cred for the idea that got it started in the first place – filling a gap in the agency landscape.

Damjanovski says that he and his co-founders had joked about creating their own agency for some time but it was something David Ogilvy had said – that a good agency is like a good hospital - that sparked the idea that would become Common Ventures.

“To torture the analogy, the worst hospitals are the ones where you get seen by one doctor who shuffles you down to another doctor and the best hospitals are the ones where you have continuity of care,” Damjanovski says.

“Why shouldn’t an ad agency be the same? It’s just so blatantly simple. We don’t say these are the strategy people and these are the creative people. We say we have strategists and creatives who work together to get work done really quickly, to get the idea that is best for you.” Common Ventures dubbs itself “strategically curious and creatively rebellious” but Damjanovski says what it actually does is problem-solve: whether that becomes an advertisement, a business plan or “owning the narrative” is entirely dependent on the problem itself.

“We help people to solve problems and we have two core skill sets to do that: strategy, which is another word for problem-solving, and creativity, which is bringing the solution to life. The whole business world is starting to shift towards that, it’s all about the user centre, the customer centre, the human centre. So we’re in a fantastic position as an industry – but no one is fucking making use of it,” Damjanovski says.

For that reason, Common Ventures often does work outside of the sphere of traditional advertising and has partnered with brands including Roadshow Entertainment, Neuw Denim and News Corp. He says the agency also prefers working on a project rather than on a retainer basis
to keep the thinking fresh, but among its retainer clients counts Salmat and Tourism NT. For the latter, the agency recently built an integrated campaign that broke the tourism advertising convention of location shots and instead focused on a compelling story arc. It also says this means eyeing every problem with what the client needs, not what the agency can offer. For Tourism NT, it works on media as well as creative.

“The idea is the agency shouldn’t have a vested interest in selling you a specific solution,” Damjanovski explains.

“It’s not a revolutionary approach to take but it just seems to be that no one wants to take it because they work back from the profitability.”

Part of this focus on problem-solving is the output: product. Common Ventures spends part of its time (around 15%) working on its own projects, outside of client briefs and budgets. So far, this has seen it create a website selling lithographic prints of Sydney’s oldest maps and a set of Game of Thrones-themed wines, the Wines of Westereos.

The former was born when Damjanovski was looking for a parking permit on the City of Sydney website and saw the map archives. The concept wine started out as an idea during a creative session and went from a talking point to a minimum viable product, with 250,000 pre-orders in one week.

“When you're in a creative session for your normal work, a creative will go 'well I had this idea' and you go 'well it’s not appropriate for the client, but pop it over here and why don't we just do it,” Damjanovski says.

“Innovation within the agency is a way for us to sell our sawdust. I think most agencies are looking at it from the point of view ‘our margins and revenues are going down from agency work, let’s do innovation because it’s kind of close to what we do’. How we look at it is we have really smart people who are really good at creating stuff for commercial purposes on the fly. But, a lot of stuff hits the cutting room floor and we never do anything with it.”

Similarly, it keeps the agency nimble. Pitching is another way to fuel creativity, purely because distilling the creative process into the intensity of a pitch keeps everyone on their game. It’s not the only agency looking at moving from ideas to the tactile, but he stops short of calling its focus an “innovation lab”. Damjavoski says it’s the industry complicating project making.

“It's not a difficult formula, you don't need to to come up with a separate unit. We don’t need incubators, the whole place is an incubator: we literally work with ideas all day,” he says.

As Common Ventures nears three, the agency is edging toward $1 million in profit . Damjanovski explains it will continue to grow but he wants the agency to stay as a “startup”, with no more than 30 people: “I’d love to get one international client and be able to show that it’s 2015 and the idea of the network is dead.”

More than that, he wants to enjoy the “mental acrobatics” of the industry.

“For us, we spent a lot of last year cleaning up processes, making sure we could get things out the door really quickly. I think this year it’s going to be a big drive to do cool shit.”

This article first appeared in AdNews in print. Click here to subscribe to the AdNews magazine or read the iPad edition here.

Have something to say on this? Share your views in the comments section below. Or if you have a news story or tip-off, drop us a line at adnews@yaffa.com.au

Sign up to the AdNews newsletter, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for breaking stories and campaigns throughout the day.

comments powered by Disqus