A sports analogy for the future of advertising

With a new pro basketball season upon us, let's consider how smaller, constantly-moving teams are a better staffing idea for developing advertising.

The ad agency analogy of the past century has been football.

Agencies front large, hyper-specialized teams. Players perform specific roles—a planner would never design something. Frequent huddles are needed to dole out discrete, inter-connected tasks. Forward momentum is often slow, minor and brutal. Lots of time is spent diagramming operations. And the entire endeavor requires lots of staffing, money and equipment.

Today we can operate more like basketball teams.

Fewer players, each with broader skill sets. The pace is faster and more improvisational. Communication between players happens more on the run. The team can adapt with greater ease than the older model. No one is surprised—in fact, it is expected that a producer can act as a writer, just as a guard can dunk or a center can shoot threes.

And yet the effort required to produce the most effective work has not changed. The deliverables are no less complex or time consuming. And expectations are certainly no less exacting.

What has changed is the means to these ends—there are now more ways in which human talent can organize themselves, and therefore even more viable routes to great ideas.