The assets are the people

Musa Kalenga, group CEO of the Brave Group, has a theory about why advertising burns people out that has nothing to do with deadlines. The industry never worked out what its asset was.

Mining understands maintenance. Advertising never did.

Musa Kalenga's comparison is the sharpest diagnosis of agency burnout we have heard, and it arrives from outside the industry's own vocabulary. In mining, he points out, you sink equipment into a site and you manage the site and the communities around it as a resource, with everything that implies.

"In creative industries, I don't think we fully appreciated that the assets are the people that create these amazing campaigns. If you're managing an asset, you are very well aware of wear and tear, you're well aware of maintenance."

Without that awareness, the norms drift somewhere ugly. Weekend work becomes standard. Endless cycles of reverts become standard. What those cycles do to a person's psychological state is nobody's line item, and he draws a straight line from there to the prevalence of substance abuse in the industry. Modern management practice, for whatever reason, never properly permeated advertising.

Crabs in a bucket

He is blunt about the model that filled the gap, and it will be recognisable to anyone who came up through an agency or a newsroom or a radio station: "go find a bunch of interns who've got a lot of potential, put them as crabs in the bucket, try get them to compete to be the best, and then ride them until the wheels fall off."

Two structural forces kept it in place. Your indispensability was measured by the awards you had won rather than by whether you were any good to work with, which makes talent management nearly impossible. And when an account moved between agencies, the team usually moved with it, so "there was never any deliberate development of the next layer." Self-preservation, not industry-building.

His read on the consequence is the part agency owners should sit with. People are opting out. Young talent and experienced talent alike are looking at a spec, recognising the 24/7 expectation inside it, and declining without negotiating. The incentive underneath all of it, he says, "tends to be fame, tends to be ego, and it tends to be all about me."

Dare, care, share

The alternative the Brave Group built runs on three words, and the detail matters more than the alliteration.

Dare is the licence to have hard conversations with clients, but only in service of the collective outcome. "We don't go there because we're going to win an award, because that's an individual outcome." It also means real autonomy, which he notes people arriving from bigger agencies often find genuinely frightening.

Care is where he puts the most weight, and he is honest that it is the hardest to land. It is choosing leaders who can show care beyond the tick-box version, and critiquing work against the collective outcome rather than the person who made it. Feedback, in his words, is the gift a lot of people don't like to receive but which makes everything that much better. New staff frequently assume it is a trap before they believe it.

Share is the concrete one. Personal development plans, which he notes are rare in agencies. Quarterly incentives tied to both business and individual performance. And an instruction that sounds small and is not: when the group picks up a listed client, open an account and buy a little of that company's stock, then build it over time. "We want junior copywriters to leave our business being shareholders in a financial services company." The point is partly financial and mostly psychological. If you hold shares in the client, the work you ship has a share price attached to it.

But what about the bottom line?

We put the obvious objection to him: an agency owner with a board and a margin hears all of this, agrees with every word, and says it is not realistic. His answer starts by conceding the point. It is not the easy road, and it is not the popular one. Then he turns it around.

"The question would be, are you doing something that you believe in sufficiently to move the needle? Simply to say, what you're doing is crazy, don't do it, for me is also the laziness that has characterised a lot of creative businesses."

He is not claiming it is solved, and says so plainly. What he does have now is evidence he did not have three years ago: around 85% work-free weekends, 90 to 95% first-time approval on work using their design-thinking method with AI embedded in it, and recognition as one of the top ten independent agencies to work for. Lead indicators rather than proof, but pointing the right way.

And a line we offered him, from a director one of us once worked for, fits the whole argument. You might train someone up and they might leave, which would be bad. What would be worse is not training them and having them stay.

Try this week: work out what your agency actually measures indispensability by, and whether that measure rewards being good to work with. Then pick the cheapest of the three pillars to start on, which is almost always a written development plan for one person who does not have one.

Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.

First published on the SA Marketers' Circle.