Welcome to the Modern Creative Agency: A Comedy Series Waiting to Happen 🎭
After years in the industry – across creative agencies, studios, and startups on either side of the world – I’ve often thought that someone really ought to make a modern-day comedy series set in an advertising agency. Not the shiny, stylised kind with minimalist desks, curated moodboards, and supernaturally attractive staff – I’m talking about the real thing. Think The Office, but swap out paper sales for pitch decks, playlists, and a whole lot of passion.
Yes, we’ve already seen the success of Mad Men, but drinking at lunch is now mostly reserved for Fridays 😉. What we need is something that does for advertising what Silicon Valley and Industry did for tech and finance – expose the underbelly of what truly drives these unique individuals: the intensity, the in-jokes, the relentless ambition, and the kind of tension that only those inside the industry truly understand. All stitched together, of course, with the humour that naturally bubbles up when the stakes are high and the deadlines are arbitrary.
The creative world is chaotic, emotional, and occasionally absurd – a perfect backdrop for comedy. It’s where staring at the ceiling is “ideation”, scrolling through your socials counts as “research”, GIFs are a legitimate form of communication, and no one bats an eyelid when someone shows up to a client meeting in a beanie and Birkenstocks. (In my case, they were nice flip-flops – Aussie pride.)
Just a quick caveat: this is all in good fun. If I generalise or offend, please know it’s not malicious – after all, we’re all just trying our best to pay the bills. But let’s be honest – great comedy thrives on a little drama and exaggeration, and this industry has more than enough to go around.
Suits vs Creatives: The Eternal Office Derby
There’s no comedy without conflict – and in agency land, the classic face-off is Suits vs Creatives.
It’s less about right and wrong, more about two very different operating systems. The Suits live in meetings and calendars, juggling deliverables and chasing client sign-offs. The Creatives speak their own language, avoid inboxes, and are deeply suspicious of the phrase, “The client had a few thoughts.”
It’s a dynamic that fuels the best kind of chaos. We even had an actual football match once – Suits vs Creatives. It started as playful banter and turned into full-blown tribal warfare. There were tactical chats over lunch, and by the final whistle, a sea of bruises and dented shin pads. There were handshakes and hugs... and a few grudges that took a pint or two to dissolve.
The whole thing? A perfect metaphor. Same game, different teams. Both want to win. The Suits are trying to keep the train on the tracks, while the Creatives are out front, redesigning the train and asking if it really needs tracks in the first place.
And when it clicks – when strategy meets imagination – the work sings. When it doesn’t? Well, all is forgotten and we soldier on.
The Clients: Guest Stars Who Steal the Show
Every great comedy needs its guest stars – enter the clients.
In my time, more often than not they’re a dream: they get it, they trust you, they even laugh at the right bits in the deck. They ask smart questions, approve things on time, and send heartfelt thank-you notes, chocolates, and bubbly. Legends.
Others… require subtitles. They "double-check" whether we can't use AI instead of doing an actual photoshoot, they send “official brand assets” in Word docs, and offer up their own sketches “just to consider” – drawn on MS Paint, ffs.
There’s the over-involved type who wants to “sit in” on every ideation session, the serial rewriter who can’t let anything go without pulling out the red pen, and the phantom approver who emerges only at the eleventh hour, armed with vague instincts and total veto power. You might spend weeks finessing a campaign, navigating countless rounds of feedback across three time zones, only to have it paused because the Founder CEO had a better idea in the shower.
But still – they mean well, and often are on your side, though their hands are tied. I get it. And when it works? When all the feedback, compromises, rewrites, brainstorms, rewrites again, and last-minute panics somehow lead to something brilliant? It’s magic. Strange, hard-won, utterly exhausting magic.
Once again, comedy thrives on tension, so please, if any clients are reading this (current or prospective), I know for a fact you can at times experience the same love/hate relationship with agencies and other suppliers – it’s a tough process like anything in the working world. In fact, my wife was a client, so I know more often than not we get along swimmingly.
The Hybrid Circus: A Workplace for the Times
Then there's the hybrid era – part office, part kitchen table, part “can you see my screen?”
Daily stand-ups used to be an awkward huddle in the middle of the office, hungover and annoyed that your bacon and egg roll was getting cold. Now it’s a Brady Bunch grid of neutral faces, someone’s dog barking in the background, and at least one person who’s far too chirpy for 9:01am.
You’ve got the office loyalists, back for the banter and the barista coffee next door. The remote lifers, who now compare their monthly commute to international travel. And the juniors – poor things – completely unprepared for in-person feedback, having grown up in the soft glow of comment threads and emoji reactions.
Office romance? Practically extinct. Everyone’s on dating apps while sitting metres apart. The over-35s – some of whom met their partners at work (hi Claire! 😘) – watch on with bemused detachment, sipping oat flat whites and wondering when everyone forgot how to flirt IRL.
It’s weird. But it works. Kind of.
Why It Works as a Comedy Series
There aren’t many other workplaces on earth where, under the same physical and virtual roof, you’ve got incredibly smart people (who probably should have gone into law, like their parents suggested) who one day are strategising the biggest hurdles for a major bank, and then seamlessly pivot to uncovering the “human truth” and “behavioural triggers” behind yoghurt eaters.
But that tension? That’s the heart of it. Big ambition within tight timelines. Brilliant ideas filtered through brand guidelines and budget spreadsheets. And yet, somehow, the work gets done – and often, done really well. The work is fast, emotional, and endlessly collaborative – even when the collaboration can feel like The Hunger Games.
At its core, a creative agency is a place full of people who care too much, argue over details no one outside the building will ever notice, and still find time to laugh through the madness. I mean, some of the most interesting work I’ve genuinely lost sleep over was for a funeral home and a nappy disposal system.
And that? That’s comedy gold.