Simon Lee.
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Simon Lee CCO & Partner at Enigma.
What would you do if money was no object?
This might seem like a strange question to be asking in the context of the advertising industry. “Industry” after all implies an exchange of goods and/or services for financial return. So to entertain the notion of the possibility of our product being produced without financial incentive may seem to some like dangerous heresy. But please stick with me, it’s important. As Doc Brown once said to Marty McFly: “It’s about your future”.
It was the popular philosopher Alan Watts who posed the “money no object” question to his audience at a lecture in the early 1970s. The lecture - the voiceover now to inspirational YouTube clips - is a stirring argument for finding what lights you up: the thing that you’re deeply passionate about, and spending your life doing it. It’s an argument that’s found voice through many orators in many forms both before and since Alan Watts, and one that, broadly speaking, elicits two distinct responses. Some find in this argument confirmation of what they’ve felt deeply all along. Others respond in chorus with generations of dream-dousing parents with words to the effect of: “Great in theory … but passion alone doesn’t pay the bills”.
The spite with which I hit the keys in writing “dousing of dreams” puts me firmly in the first camp. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to live a creative life. I love putting work out into the world that engages an audience, captures their imagination, acts as a catalyst to different ways of thinking or behaving. And, for over twenty years, the advertising industry has afforded me the opportunity to do what I love in service of a raft of great brands and people. And, sceptics be damned, my passion has comfortably paid the bills.
I use myself as an example, but this isn’t about me, it’s about the millions of us who carry a fire that makes what we do far more than just a job. It’s this fire that has spawned so many of the great agencies on which our industry is built. Passionate, talented people with a burning ambition to bring their unique voice and vision to shaping the advertising and cultural landscape.
Of course the creative founders of these seminal agencies all had/have strong financial drivers, but by the very nature of who they were or are, the money was/is just part of the equation. Bill Bernbach’s famous 1947 letter is a case in point. He didn’t write about a passion for profitability and an ambition to sell DDB to a multinational holding company and deliver dividends to shareholders that he would never meet. His focus was clear: “proving to the world that good taste, good art and good writing can be good selling”. And if DDB became the huge commercial success that it was, it’s because of this focus, this fire, this purpose, and the unfair competitive advantage that DDB’s brand of creativity delivered to its clients.
There’s a clear, proven order here: payment follows passion. And in 2025, if we’re seeing the depletion and extinction of agency brands that have stood for decades as pillars of the industry, it’s because a blinkered focus on the former has overridden the latter. Through a path of Holdco acquisition, merger and consolidation, businesses born of a talent and passion for commercial creativity have transformed into investment vehicles that exist primarily to deliver returns to invisible shareholders. And the harsh reality is that as investment vehicles of this kind, in 2025 they struggle to stack up.
Some see this as a reason to subscribe to a narrative of inevitable demise for our industry. I don’t. I’m unsettled by the disintegration of the long-established order and hugely saddened to see the mass redundancies that come with it, but I’m not mourning the death of the industry, I’m celebrating the potential for its renewal.
This is no rose-tinted gaze into the future though. The economics that are killing the old model will mercilessly strike down any alternative that isn’t clear on where its true value lies. And it lies where it always really has: in the unique strategic and creative voices that invest themselves personally in solving the problems that keep clients up at night.
Of course technology has a role to play in the future of advertising agencies, but technology is the tech industry’s value add, not ours. Ours is human creativity and thinking, and every decision a creative company makes must promote and protect this precious, valuable humanity. Which brings us back round to the question with which I began. Because ironically, as we rise from the chaos and ashes, the agency models that will sustainably succeed in making money are those that are built around the talented, passionate ad-people who when asked “what would you do if money was no object?” reply “this”.
Simon Lee is a 20+ year indie agency veteran. From 2011 to early 2025 he was the joint owner and CCO of The Hallway, helping to take the agency to the forefront of the Australian indie scene and winning seven agency of the year titles. He was appointed as indie agency Enigma’s first ever CCO and creative partner in March this year.
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