A Business Insider feature posted this morning offers an interesting look at creative hiring trends at a certain agency as Deutsch CCO Pete Favat and chief digital officer Winston Binch tell Lara O’Reilly about some unusual places they go to find new creatives.
Specifically, that would be reddit and Instagram.
Favat told BI:
“The idea of hiring people in advertising is over. We will just regurgitate what has already been done. If advertising continues to copy itself and take influence from itself, that’s why people will get put off of advertising.”
That sounds good, no? Our readers may disagree on the wisdom of Deutsch’s conscious decision to seek out what it calls “internet kids” to work in its creative department, but the four juniors mentioned did have some nice side projects going.
For example, Bryan and Beau Abbott are now working on the Sprint account as copywriter and art director after someone at Deutsch discovered their “Baseball Card Vandals” project on Instagram.
It may not be quite accurate to say that neither brother had ever worked in advertising before since Beau lists a copywriting gig at Missouri agency Moosylvania on his resume, but the point is that they didn’t apply directly for gigs at Deutsch and were apparently hired on the strength of this project (which is fun).
Junior art director Dan Atwater also got picked up based on his Instagram account, which links to his portfolio and includes work like this short by a group of Havas Chicago interns.
He’s not exactly a stranger to the agency world either as he’s interned with DDB and describes himself as an “Aspiring Art Director.” But again, according to the BI post Deutsch found him via the work shared on the Instagram account.
Kurt Gassman actually did apply to work at the agency, but he did so in a very creative way by compiling a little photo narrative about his paper application, which he turned into an origami crane.
So the agency isn’t just picking random things they like on social media and hiring the people who created them. But Favat says he does encourage his team to “[pay] attention to Instagram, Vine, art, comedy, shows on Netflix — and keep an eye out for potential new hires.” The argument is that people doing fun things online will know better how to appeal to people looking for fun things online…and some of that future content may be produced by Deutsch clients in a perfect world. Not sure how that would work with Netflix shows, but Deutsch did hire T.J. Miller of Silicon Valley.
Here’s the money quote from Binch:
“We are investors and we invest ahead of revenue and that’s very rare for an ad agency — most of which are just busy managing their margins. And that’s the quickest way to die. Invention and innovation has to be the biggest part of our business model. We’ll make mistakes, but that’s what makes it exciting for us.”
You should read the full post, though.
