Can advertising agencies live in the cloud?

It's very hard getting the decor of an advertising agency right - too flamboyant and Clients think they are probably paying for it through overly high fees, too understated (or just plain cheap) and it smacks of a lack of creativity and success. But what if you avoid the issue completely and get rid of your offices – well that's what an agency called 'UP there everywhere' has done and it now resides in the cloud. 

As we all know, a cloud is no longer simply the thing William Wordsworth felt like as he wandered amongst hosts of golden daffodils, it is in fact where most of us live big chunks of our lives. All our personal information on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and increasingly our music collections and photo albums are held in the cloud – rows of servers in underground bunkers in places like Canary Wharf in London's Docklands and Palo Alto in Silicon Valley hold all of our data.  The cloud is also booming for business with companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, HP and Google competing for more companies to do away with their own servers and use one of their cloud based services.

'UP', as its employees call it - more of them later - describes itself as the first 'global cloud based advertising agency' and is the brain child of ad man Julian Stubbs.  After selling his Stockholm based ad agency, Dowell Stubbs to communications group Gyro in 2010, Stubbs took a year off and went round the world, instead of coming back with a lot of dodgy t-shirts, he came back with an idea: create an international ad agency based in the cloud with members (rather than employees) from right around the globe, all linked together with the latest social tools.

Two years later and that idea is a cloud-based reality with over 100 members in the US, UK, Scandinavia and Continental Europe and it's growing fast. 

As someone who has always liked the creature comforts of his own office and spent many an hour deliberating over the paint colour of reception walls, I decided to meet up with Julian Stubbs in a non-cloud based bar in London, to quiz him about the new agency.

PB: What do Clients make of a cloud based agency?

JS:  We're are like Marmite, we're certainly not for everyone and clients either love the idea or hate it but those that see the advantages have bought in to it in a big way. They are often highly complex international pieces of business, that are used to putting teams together across many countries and of course that's an advantage we have, the ability to speedily tailor-make an international team around the client, whether that be a US based healthcare company, or an international hotel chain.

PB: How can you generate the culture of an ad agency when you have no offices and you are all dotted around the world?

JS: I don't think we could have done it as recently as five or six years ago but technology has made a huge difference. To give you two examples, our UP Facebook page is a rich, vibrant community where ideas can be freely exchanged by our members and a sense of our UP values clearly comes through and video Skyping brings members together on a daily basis.

PB: But don't you still want to physically get everyone together?

JS: We do. We just had a workshop in Stockholm and our plan is to get everyone together twice a year but the great thing is because we have an online social community and use all the social tools at our disposal, it means when we do come together, we are not a group of strangers.

PB: Surely you must need to have meeting rooms for Clients sometimes?

JS: In the last few years of running Dowell Stubbs, I found that an increasing number of clients didn't have the time to come to you and expected meetings to take place in their offices, so that's often where they happen but you're right we do sometimes need meeting rooms and we are fortunate to be able to take advantage of another big trend. Whether it's London, Stockholm or New York there has been an explosion in creative meeting spaces that you can hire. Why should clients pay for a lavish overhead when you simply don't need it 24/7.



I like the idea of a cloud based agency, and although I can see it's not going to be for everyone, it seems to capture the Zeitgeist and fit in with this online socially connected world we all live in, it also breaks down international borders and brings diverse talent together from all over the planet - not a bad ethos for the 21st century. And it's also arrived in an economic climate when many Clients are rigorously interrogating what their fees pay for and it may just be they baulk at those Italian designer sofas.