Why you needn't reinvent the wheel for the road to recovery: striking out on your own gives you the unique chance to translate your values to a blank canvas, says On the One's Rob Mathie
We started On the One in 2018 when a client did the unthinkable – gave us to the chance to start an agency with a founding partner and a chance to translate the purpose-led marketing we were doing into the blueprint for a new kind of agency. Within a year we’d picked up another client, had some key award wins… but what happens when the business you’re working on changes course and your values misalign? Is it time to set sail for unchartered waters or be taken where the wind is blowing?
and we’ve always believed that the good brands can do is only relative to the people driving that agenda. However, in the space of a few months all our allies had gone, the founding client had walked away from their purpose and our contract was up. A familiar tale to many agencies who will realise the only constant in marketing is change, a change that happened for us as the country entered its first – but not last – lockdown of 2020. So we chose to walk. While many small agencies went into furloughs we decided to press on, double down and look at what brought us to the dance in the first place.
– we delivered on a last piece of work outside of our contract which allowed us to spend the summer looking back at our body of work and the tumultuous times around us before we understood that our original values were actually more important now than ever. From the George Floyd BLM protests to the creative industry’s collective distress signal, we realised that adopting an ‘activist mindset’ was the unifying connection between the work we’d done before and the work that needed to be done right now.
Now, as we enter what will hopefully the last bend in the road to recovery we distilled the core questions we asked in order to better understand our values:
We realised quickly that our ‘friends and family’ network from our talent-led campaigns allowed us access to those shaping culture. The result was our “Active Listening: Culture’s New Rules” report – a series of interviews with opinion-leaders that set out a manifesto for brands adopting the traits of activism.
The agency comes from strong music background which has coloured our professional and private lives. We saw that the industry needed help and that the grassroots scene was under threat. We spoke to our network about what brands needed to do next and within a few weeks were putting a music strategy together for a blue-chip brand.
Shocked at the treatment of protesters during the Sarah Everard vigils, we reconnected with an early client UN Women to help them end Violence Against Women and Girls – within a few weeks were connecting them to brands looking to make long term changes in making a safer world for women once we start reconnecting again.
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We were seeing a lot of bold impactful work out there to address the climate emergency but were worried that the gains made pre-COVID would be stifled by the economic and social realities created by the pandemic. After talking consistently about what brands can do next, we were able to connect with a major high street retailer with a similar agenda and our sustainable beauty campaign for Superdrug was born. In walking away, we learned a great deal more about who we were, what we stood for and where we wanted to go. Could it be that in order to recover as an industry, the spirit of reinvention needs a mix of understanding our own story and listening to the stories of others to shape the actions in the world today?
