Farm or Hunt?

How people put food on the table in the agency world.

You may have heard that people can be divided into two categories. Farmers and hunters. Nowhere is it more true than in the agency business.

The farmers are the ones who sow the creative seeds, plow the fields, pull the weeds and harvest the final product. They are craftspeople who have a system that has generated good work in the past, so they stick to it. Same soil. Same water. Same sunlight. Same fertilizer. They essentially do the same work over and over. And they’re fine with that. Many of them rely upon their machines to do a lot of the back-breaking work that we used to do by hand back in the day. (Thanks, Mr. Jobs…) Farmers produce a great deal of highly consistent work. If a storm or drought comes along (due to undforseen client changes or secret deadlines) it messes with their production, and their crop can be ruined. Or they have to scramble to get the work to market. But aside from those near-calamities, Farmers are usually calm, collected and confident that the work will get done.

The hunters are the creative people who sharpen their tools by the fire while they tell the great stories of hunts in by-gone days. Always with the great stories. And then they head out into an uncertain world to track down an idea or a positioning statement or an insight and kill it so they can drag it back to the agency. Every hunt is different (which is one reason they make for great stories.) Sometimes you hunt ideas the size of elk. Sometimes rabbits. Occasionally those ideas are elephant-sized. You get a shot at a whale once or twice in your career. The thing about hunters is that they head out every day not knowing what they’ll bring back. It’s electric. The uncertainty and excitement mixed together makes the hunt worthwhile. But also, stressful. There’s anxiety in being a hunter because you never know what you’ll find out in the wild.

“Give a farmer a spear and he’s going to poke holes in the ground with it. Give a hunter a plow and he’s going to try to throw it at a moose.”

I’m not saying one is better than the other. In truth, a good agency needs a mix. A creative boutique shop may have more hunters. And a digital shop may be dominated by farmers. But most agencies have a balance of the two. Some meat. Some potatoes. You need both to set a good table for a range of different client needs.

In pitches, you need hunters to find the great ideas, and you need farmers to help get the presentation together and make it beautiful.

Here’s the thing. You usually can’t ask a hunter to farm. Or a farmer to hunt. It takes a long time to build up the skills of either, and while there are extremely rare people out there with both sets of skills, they likely gravitate toward one over the other. Give a farmer a spear and he’s going to poke holes in the ground with it. Give a hunter a plow and he’s going to try to throw it at a moose. In other words, you’re not going to get the results you want unless you let hunters hunt and farmers farm.

So which are you?

Grant Sanders is the Creative Director at Mintz + Hoke Advertising in Avon, CT. When he’s not hunting there, he’s at home on Nantucket Island where he has a really nice grill.