So why does Digit-One exist?
Benno Purin
Director Clients & Operations, Co-Founder @ Digit-One
There are agencies by the dozen. Fundamentally, almost any designer or marketer can start an agency and compete with established providers in the market. That brings a number of difficulties into the agency market, felt not only by the businesses themselves but by clients and employees too. Hardly any industry moves as fast as advertising. Hardly any industry changes as fast as advertising. Every day brings new challenges and new priorities for the people working in this field.
The difficulties agencies are up against
There are agencies by the dozen. Fundamentally, almost any designer or marketer can start an agency and compete with established providers in the market. That brings a number of difficulties into the agency market, felt not only by the businesses themselves but by clients and employees too. Hardly any industry moves as fast as advertising. Hardly any industry changes as fast as advertising. Every day brings new challenges and new priorities for the people working in this field.
Agencies find it hard to keep pace with trends. When did we last see a major upheaval in this industry? What's the real problem? When it comes to budget, the agency sits at the end of the food chain more and more often. And it doesn't look like there'll be an upswing any time soon, because all of this has led us down a dark path on which even talented people don't stay long. So while they're in serious difficulty internally, agencies also face extreme external challenges where the pressure keeps rising. On top of these problems from within, more and more challenges come at agencies from outside. Good projects only seem winnable through tenders, which require several thousand euros of upfront work just to be allowed to take part in the pitch. And projects often have to be costed so tightly that in the end either client satisfaction suffers or the projects slide into the red.
Our decision to go it alone
We love this work! The individuality of clients, the conversations, immersing ourselves in all kinds of industries, and the strategies for positioning partners and clients as well as possible. Every single member of the Digit-One team feels completely at home in the agency world. It's a joy to work with people, to exchange ideas together and to find solutions that deliver, using what we know. But we experienced the industry's difficulties first-hand as employees too. We firmly believe that structures can — and must — be broken, even when they've existed and functioned for many years. So we set out to prove to ourselves and to the industry: there is another way! We want to look beyond the obvious, and we believe that not everything has to stay the way it's always been. An agency service can be like any other professional service, one in which not only the project goals but the people are at the centre.
So we're setting out to rethink projects and above all how we work together — and hopefully to cast the business in a new light.
The search for our own identity
It was clear to us from the outset: we want to see meaning in what we do, to have a vision, to grow and to learn. So together we quite quickly defined a few principles and, above all, a group of non-clients, in order to find a shared consensus. It was also important to us from the start to bring people back into projects, to be transparent and to communicate on equal footing. With low-code and no-code frameworks we have the chance to save hours spent implementing code without having to accept any loss of quality — and thereby to bring the goals, opinions, wishes and requirements of our clients and partners back into focus. Honest communication outwardly and pragmatic action internally came first even during the founding phase. By optimising the many steps from project start to go-live, we want to show the market that both sides — client and agency alike — can benefit from a project and be happy with it. We've followed this philosophy from the very beginning, and it's what makes us glad to walk into the office afresh every day.
Looking back on the first months
What we learned in the founding phase: good things take time. Even though our vision for the agency was already fully painted, it naturally takes a lot of thought and several meetings to put together a fitting partnership agreement. Fortunately, alongside our previous employer, many people supported us in finding the right path and getting off to a good start. By now we've delivered our first projects successfully and clearly recognised that this upright attitude, these values and an exchange that's open both internally and externally do very much have a place in the market. We're glad to have taken this path — breaking old structures, building trust and having more fun at work ourselves.
Conclusion: shape your own future!
Going it alone isn't an easy step. And it's certainly not always the right one.
But if you're unhappy in your comfort zone, there is a way out. Stepping out of that comfort gives you an incredible boost of motivation — and if the step is right for you, you'll also see that you can change something both for yourself and for the people around you. We're incredibly glad to have founded Digit-One and to be working together on cool projects and happy clients. And who knows: maybe we'll manage to shift some thinking in the industry.
Very much in the spirit of:
"If you always do what you've always done, you always get what you've always gotten"
