I knew immediately that something was amiss the morning I walked into the agency and everyone seemed to look downwards and scurry out of the way. Folks were gathered in small groups whispering
furtively and disbanding as I walked by. I’d never seen this before at the San Francisco interactive group I ran some years ago. Our culture had been very friendly, hip, open. Maybe too open, it
turned out.
We’d been hiring online media specialists as fast as we could. In the space of a year we went from around five to a hundred interactive media specialists. Still, we couldn’t find
enough people to fill the gaping maw of our clients’ needs. In effect, this created a relative abundance of traditional media folks relative to our need for almost-non-existent interactive talent.
Naturally, we offered these “interactive” folks what we had to. This amounted to something around 20 to 40 percent more than we’d offer your normal run-of-the-mill media employee. And this was the
morning that the difference in pay dawned upon the rest of the company. The “secret” spread through the troops like rumors of a client loss.
We were offering starting salaries of up to $45,000 for
people out of college. The $28,000 a year traditional media buyer—who’d been working already for more than a year—took this as a stab in the back.
And on this fateful morning, a rapidly formed
commission of traditional media buyers came seeking me out, the daggers now in their eyes. By 11 a.m., I was giving them an audience, describing their three basic options: l They could help out the
agency by adding some interactive work to their responsibilities—of course something that I’d already tried to foist on them previously. l They could suck it up and continue to work in traditional
media, hoping that it became worth more in the labor market in the future (ironically, it later did since a similar supply problem occurred when so many traditional folks went interactive). l They
could quit and go join the circus.
After explaining the rationale behind the differences, folks realized there wasn’t a dastardly plot involved, and eventually the traditional media folks all did
take one of the three options (except, instead of joining the circus, they went to business school). In all, the controversy ended quite amicably.
This was a bit of a turning point for our
company. It finally drove home that not only had interactive become a crucial part of our business, but that it had a direct effect on each individual, even if they continued to stick their heads in
the traditional media sand.
It also forced me to encourage some cultural changes to ensure that the interactive folks showed proper respect for the “traditionalistas.” As always, some of this
management problem too was due to personal relations. But most importantly, it taught me that forcing employees to keep their salaries secret is both impractical and cynical. It might suit a
short-sighted employer’s ends by keeping the internal labor market a little less fluid, but it also prevents workers from understanding quite viscerally why it remains important to improve their
abilities.
After managing several large ad agency interactive groups, Tig Tillinghast now consults with many large agencies and is director of agency strategy for Solbright. He can be reached at
tig@mediaone.net.