The Agency Swindler Is a Cautionary Tale for the Creative Sector

There’s been a recent flurry of stories about extreme scammers, from Netflix’s The Tinder Swindler and Inventing Anna to British podcast Sweet Bobby. Now add to the con artist canon Madbird, a hot new design agency that lured in dozens of employees—but turned out to be fake. It was surely only a matter of time before the creative industry got its own online scam to add to the mix. This week, the BBC published its year-long investigation into Madbird’s con. The scammer behind Madbird, Ali Ayad, convinced more than 50 people from around the world to work for six months on a commission-only basis, with the promise of a $47,300 (£35,000) salary if illusory deals were secured. Ayad portrayed himself as a visionary creative director who had worked for brands including Nike, but both his career history and the agency he founded did not exist. Madbird’s employees were never paid. Madbird may be a sensational tale, but it holds a warning about certain factors of the creative sector and its changing working conditions that could leave workers vulnerable to other forms of exploitation, according to industry leaders. Exploitable Conditions For many people, the creative industries are tough to break into and competition for jobs is fierce. This can make some job seekers more “desperate” and thus open to exploitative hiring or working practices, said Mike Carter, managing director of Orchard, a U.K.-based digital, creative and marketing recruitment consultancy. “There’s an enormous amount of people desperate to work in creative who will never get a job there,” Carter explained. “The induction into the creative sector is still somewhat Dickensian and based around an abuse of work—your first job is often unpaid, and in advertising, some people work on allowances for two years before getting paid a full salary. This may be good for creative output, as it can filter out candidates with lower creative standards, but it’s not very good for people.” The industry is too seduced by charisma.Charlie Rudd, Leo Burnett Like other industries, job prospects in the creative sector were even harder hit during the initial phases of the pandemic, when many businesses laid off employees or instituted hiring freezes. These precarious conditions laid the groundwork for a scam like Madbird, whose employees were “all young adults looking for work” during an economic crisis, so “felt they had no choice but to accept the terms in their contracts,” the BBC reported. Since then, however, as economic conditions in the sector have improved and many employers are now struggling to fill job vacancies, the balance of power has shifted in favor of workers, Carter said. “In two years, it’s massively flipped the other way, so desperate employers could be more likely to get phished by candidates,” he cautioned. “You could see how [an employee] could end up in a business without proving anything.” A Double-Edged Sword Aside from hurting employment prospects, the pandemic also changed the sector’s working conditions by forcing many people to do their jobs and run businesses remotely. This shift also set the scene for Madbird, whose employees worked from home and never saw a real office. [A fake agency] could happen again. With digital, there is the ability to create an entity that isn't what it appears to be.Mike Carter, Orchard “The working world was turned upside down. It became like the wild west in terms of what companies even are anymore,” Leo Burnett London chief executive Charlie Rudd said. “Perhaps in a world that’s been turned upside down, there’s even more naïveté about what’s real and what isn’t.” Even as Covid-19 restrictions relax, many creative businesses plan to maintain a hybrid setup between remote and in-office working or go remote altogether. This flexibility may serve as a “double-edged sword,” said Ogilvy Netherlands CEO Jai Kotecha. “Flexible working has provided the freedom to work whenever and however we want,” he said, but simultaneously, “personal relationships with peers can be difficult to navigate in a digital setting.” As work moves further into the digital realm, employers “should strive to provide employees with opportunities to foster genuine relationships, allowing for these checks and balances,” Kotecha said. Carter also urged job seekers to do their due diligence, such as by insisting on face-to-face meetings or talking to other employees one-on-one. “[A fake agency] could happen again. With digital, there is the ability to create an entity that isn’t what it appears to be,” he added. Dangers of Digital The rise of digital platforms, which is set to intensify with the coming of the metaverse, has allowed for the proliferation of scams because “it’s very easy to hide” in the digital realm, Rudd observed. Just look how digital played a pivotal role in other stories of con artists: The Tinder Swindler could have never happened without dating apps, while the victim in Sweet Bobby met her catfisher on Facebook. This is not a problem exclusive to the creative sector, but the marketing industry is partly culpable for perpetuating some of these digital falsehoods, Carter said. He pointed to the popularity of influencers and how many brands and agencies work with them. Stories such as Madbird “highlight our susceptibility to believing that digital is real. What we accept as true has shifted so fundamentally,” Carter continued. “The influencer generation has created an industry that is essentially fake. The readiness of some people to believe blindly in digital marketing is quite terrifying.” Additionally, the creative sector is sometimes “too seduced by charisma,” Rudd said. At Madbird, Ayad compared himself to tech titans such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. He may be an extreme case, but the industry has other examples of figures who have demonstrated an inflated sense of self. “People looking for jobs need to look for authenticity rather than charisma. Ask, ‘Do I really buy into this person, not just the charisma and the bullshit that comes with that?’” Rudd advised. Craving Authenticity Since it has been uncovered, another con at the scale of Madbird may be unlikely, but scam stories highlight fears about the consequences of a person, workplace or industry built upon superficiality. The influencer generation has created an industry that is essentially fake.Mike Carter, Orchard While the pandemic may have worsened some factors that allow for exploitation, the upheaval it caused has also left some people craving “authenticity and a fixed point in their lives more than ever,” Rudd said. In the creative sector, for example, more agency leaders are touting the importance of human connection and in-person collaboration to creativity. “The best creative agencies are built on culture, and that’s a really difficult thing to build. It takes a lot of time and energy. That’s the glue that makes you want to go there and work harder, but it’s based on people,” said Julian Harriman-Dickinson, founder and executive creative director of creative agency HarrimanSteel. “That’s where I worry this could go with digital and remote working becoming the norm. We’re setting ourselves up for some big pitfalls and could lose one of the most valuable things that creative agencies have.” Why the British Ad Industry Is Finally Set to Unionize