People Buy People

02 February 2026

A substantial disconnect (one of many to be fair) between advertising people and financial commentators and investors is the degree of (dis)comfort with the old notion that 70% of an agency’s assets go up and down in the lift every day.

Ad people naturally enough believe this to be true. The greatest asset they have is their people, and the reason for that is that they’re convinced, as am I that advertisers buy people. Plus it’s always reassuring to be described as an asset.

Clients buy experience, talent. They want people they can trust, people who will put their needs first, people who can sit alongside them and help them solve their problems.

That’s not to say they don’t want tools, technologies, AI, data geeks and dashboards. It’s just that those things are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

To paraphrase Sir John Hegarty at the launch of Advertising: Who Cares? in September 2024: ‘Nobody remembers Gutenberg’s second book. The guy invented an astonishing piece of technology, which changed the world. As far as we know he never printed a word of his own. Bartolomeo Cristofori may have invented the piano, but history suggests he never composed a note’.

This reliance on human creativity unsettles those happiest with spreadsheets. How can they value a genius over a mere mortal? How do they identify a genius in the first place? Geniuses are unstable assets; they may very well go down in the lift and then continue on straight out of the door.

Of course many also can’t articulate why AI will change the ad world for the better, although they’re happy enough pointing out how many jobs it will replace.

I was working in Leo Burnett in the US in 1993 when a Chicago-based fund manager called David Herro initiated the campaign that eventually led to Maurice Saatchi and his brother Charles being removed from the agency they founded.

I was asked by my bosses for my opinion, I suppose as the resident Brit. I said I thought it likely that the brothers would attract a number of Saatchi and Saatchi clients to their new agency, M&C Saatchi. Others would be unsettled. Maybe we could benefit?

This observation was met with incredulity; clients were loyal to institutions, not individuals.

Turns out many weren’t then, nor are they now.

These thoughts were prompted by what’s happening today, with mergers, layoffs, closures. Ivan Fernandes’ post a week or two ago on LinkedIn puts it well. Those being cast aside won’t disappear; they’ll reappear bursting with talent and ideas that have been suppressed over their time in a large holding company.

Many will use the tools, the technologies in the way they’ve learned. They’ll focus on clients and putting the tools to work. Rather than boasting online that solution A is so superior to solution B for reasons that only the true specialist can be expected to appreciate, they’ll be adding in their human expertise, and mixing it all together to benefit their advertisers.

Thanks for the piano Bartolomeo, time for the geniuses to create music.