Instead of a party, we wrote a blog

Allegory turns one this week. It’s been 365 fun, hard, invigorating, exhausting, enlightening, wonderful days. 

And what better way to mark it than to remember to do some marketing. 

In an effort to differentiate this from every other piece marking a milestone for someone’s indie venture, let’s get the obvious out of the way first.

Getting an agency off the ground is very, very hard. It requires depths of resilience and audacity you never knew you had, let alone tapped into. You go back to the well a lot, and discover just how deep it goes. 

The support of others is vital, and more often than not, very forthcoming. For a sector where differentiation and margins are both low, the camaraderie and generosity is a constant credit to those who work in it. 

You learn a lot about your co-founders, and test the limits of longstanding relationships. We’re all still friends, perhaps even more so than before. We’ll mark that down as a win.

But all of that is a bit too obvious (and saccharine). 

When Allegory launched, we did so with a foundational essay. This was an effort to define (perhaps even justify) our existence, and set out why, in a market that was seemingly witnessing a new agency being born every other day, we established our own.

Far more interesting than evaluating whether we’ve stuck to every principle and goal we declared (spoiler: we did not) is what has defined us in the last 12 months.

Motivated by a lack of time and patience, clients really do want senior support from independent consultancies, but most procurement departments are still lagging, with the old IBM principle holding firm. Forget some grand AI-powered realignment, procurement that keeps up with the dynamism required in every other aspect of the business would be the most game changing development for ambitious indies.

Every agency has grand plans about what it is and what it is not, of doing the best work of their careers, of diving, Scrooge McDuck-like, into a pile of gold and awards. But it turns out the fastest way to be integral is to be useful. It’s an underrated concept.

Fuelling the growth trajectory inevitably, often reluctantly, leads to LinkedIn. There, you are usually met by the keyboard warriors who have cracked the code and been rewarded by the algorithm. 

If you spend enough time on the platform, you’d be forgiven for thinking everyone is engaged in deep discussions around the importance of a channel, tactic, discipline, or technology. It is important to remember no one in the real world has time for any of that. The only way to make such a case is to prove it.

And finally, to artificial intelligence. Ironically the most discussed topic on LinkedIn, AI can often cause even the most dedicated of readers to glaze over. 

Nevertheless, it has essentially redefined our future as an agency. Why would any client pay for a junior team member to do in billable hours what AI can do in milliseconds? The pyramid structure has gone the way of, well, the pyramids - something built on the shoulders of put-upon workers that no one would ever attempt now. 

We may still end up hiring colleagues young enough to be our children, but they’re more likely to be content creators, creative writers, and Gen Alpha cultural conduits than media monitoring drones.   

Attempting to make predictions for year two is a fool’s game - we are defined as much by our environment as we are by ourselves. It makes for grey hairs and sleepless nights, but it’s never dull, and we’ll take that. Here’s to the next rollercoaster ride around the sun.