For creative agencies across the globe one of the main challenges has always been finding and retaining great people. The output of an amazing creative culture is founded on the values of the business fueled by creative chemistry between highly talented people with unique expertise working together. It is this magical formula that produces amazing work and reinforces an agency’s business reputation that is reflected in every project.

Today we are seeing movement against this mindset toward the idea that a creative team can function like a SaaS, something to be turned on to reduce hassle and save time and then turned off when no longer needed. I call this trend The Rise of the Ghost Firm. Taking cues from ghost kitchens (restaurants preparing food in non-commercial spaces to be ordered online for delivery directly to customers) that gained momentum during the pandemic, the Ghost Firm promises the same caliber of work you would expect from an agency with more speed, cost value and convenience — great design and development delivered right to your door. In this article, I try to understand why this trend seems to be gaining ground and examine how this reflects our shifting business ideologies and cultural viewpoints on creative practice.

On-demand creative teams

Several platforms, freelance marketplaces, and services have sprung up over recent years that promise to eliminate the time and effort of hiring a design or development team. Overall this business proposition takes the strategy that the work of creative and technology people can be packaged like software.

The idea of unlimited requests, flat-rate, and no contracts can be applied to pretty much any service. These creative platforms’ business models are designed to reduce frustration, save time, increase reliability and to save money. Again, all of these promises can be applied to any number of services from groceries to car insurance.

On-demand creative talent might sound new, but team augmentation has been around for a long time and talent-matching services are often used by many large-scale organizations. Hiring other firms to assist in the completion of specific expertise for a project is also commonplace. For example, many creative firms often prefer to hand off digital execution. Similarly, for specialized skills such as high-end 3D, animation, photography, and illustration, agencies usually engage with specific individuals or firms that specialize in these areas.

What makes on-demand creative teams different is that the specific individuals you are working with are unknown (Ghosts) at the outset and the primary focus is about getting something done. As people, we have a natural impulse to want to learn about an agency, view their work, and see the team. On-demand creative services often obscure the actual individual talent and prioritize convenience and cost. This means that the client’s mindset for what to expect fundamentally changes from working with creatively talented people to solve a problem to merely getting a creative result.

When you hire an agency partner, a client usually comes to the table with a project need while knowing the work will require that the client and agency build a deep relationship of shared trust to get the job done. A project with lots of moving parts requires patience, teamwork and expertise. With this point of view, project success requires ideation and dialogue that an agency model and process is purpose built for.

In contrast, if a client such as an early-stage startup is coming to a project with the perspective that speed, ease and cost are the driving criteria then an on-demand creative service might be a better fit because the work needed is not about fostering a deep shared relationship and more about speed and cost of execution while feeling that the work will get done well.

Live to work or work to live

As a designer or creative technologist, why work for an on-demand creative platform? The answer is simple. Flexibility. Working at an agency can be extremely fulfilling, but agency methodologies are not totally wired for the gig economy. Performance reviews, planning paid time off months in advance, and a more rigid work schedule are necessary constraints that make the agency model work.

With an on-demand creative services platform a creative person can work remotely, have a good salary and work flexible hours. The upside can also be a downside if you are trying to build a career and grow. In my view it ultimately comes down to how you want to live your life and your tolerance for knowing that the platform you work for may only invest in you as much as you invest in it. Clearly, smart and talented people that want to do good work are being hired by on-demand services and the hope is that these platforms will grow their communities of talent and foster mentorship and advancement not unlike agencies.

Ultimately not everyone is wired to be a freelancer or a gig worker because sometimes it can be isolating, and cash flow can be uncertain. On-demand creative services platforms may offer more stability while retaining the ability to plug in and unplug. I worry that some creatives may be buying into a kind of “OnlyFans for creative work” scenario where there is a law of diminishing creative and economic returns the more you work or in reality, only a few really good people get the better projects.

There is still a certain allure to being part of an agency because agencies still have a glow credibility about them and adding your title on LinkedIn feels good, showing others your career is going somewhere. It is unclear how creative services platforms with a legion of remote talent that can weave in and out of project cycles will maintain a high level of quality, keep clients happy, and be satisfying as a career move. Like a code bootcamp, perhaps these Ghost Firms will become a kind of farm team where you begin your career or where you kickstart your second career and eventually move toward an agency or in-house creative role.

The ghosts in the machine

In general, people are one of the most costly aspects of running a creative business. When we think about headcount for full-time staff in relation to revenue, it makes a lot of economic sense to try to leverage any kind of creative efficiencies that can reduce the number of people needed while not impacting the quality of the work.

To maximize revenue and to reduce cost, some companies are moving toward a model where a few internal creative leaders are no longer building and managing an internal creative team or retaining an agency but are managing a suite of external tools and remote teams to complete creative projects. This kind of master of puppets solution relies on tools and platforms that can obfuscate the actual creative people doing the work behind the scenes. In this scenario, the names of individual people become less important than the skill and reliability of the output they create.

It may be shocking to us now, but in my view, we may be entering a new norm where there is a gradual move away from prioritizing “who” or “what” did something creative in the commercial context. Authorship may become moot. Under this approach, any creative solution can be achieved through a combination of on-demand services, in-house talent, templates, white label, or contract labor with only a person or two orchestrating and molding the raw material into a final product. The best analogy I can muster is that of the DJ where teams become replaced by tools and services that produce enough of a form factor to be stitched together by one or two creatives into a discernible design system or product at less time and cost.

The above is an idealized scenario but even if it becomes partly viable and replicable it will fundamentally change how creatives operate within business. As we know, it is already happening as templates, AI services, brand tools, and brand system platforms begin to become widely adopted. A few really good Ghosts in the machine might not be a bad thing if it makes the actual creative people more empowered and creatively fulfilled. It is just a matter of getting better at organization and execution and for certain savvy designers and managers to learn how to effectively assemble their virtual band.

The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades

As we look at our overall global economic outlook combined with radical changes in business and technology I speculate that we will see many more Ghost Firms promising new more instantaneous, intelligent, automated and inexpensive models for design and development.

For those creatives that are hyper-curious, open to new solutions, and willing to learn new skills, we are at the beginning of a new creative renaissance. Artificial intelligence technologies like Chat GPT, MidJourney, and all the rest will continue to get better and augment our creative abilities to create and deliver great work. Add to the equation our deeper adoption of brand tools, templates, and toolkits to expedite our processes, and you have the ingredients for amazing things when placed in the right talented hands. In the wrong hands, it will just produce more average work.

For the cost cutters that are looking for faster and cheaper design solutions, I imagine that we will see an increasing explosion of work that is an assemblage of “Ghost Parts” that does the job but will feel cheaper, rough around the edges, and not quite right. As we see the further rise of the Ghost Firm mindset new territories of creative practice will begin to be codified in the next few years. Some will make our lives far better while other solutions will introduce new complexities and problems. Only time will tell.

Note.

I have purposely left out naming any specific create services platforms in this article. For those interested in learning about them I would Google terms like ”creative services on demand” and “creative team unlimited revisions.” I thought the term Ghost Firm was a cool blanket term for such on-demand create services. Feel free to use it!

Helpful Links

Rethinking the on-demand workforce. By Joseph Fuller, Manjari Raman, Allison Bailey, and Nithya Vaduganathan. Harvard Business Review

Love this quote from the article: “To get the most out of talent platforms, companies need to break work down into rigorously defined components that can be easily handed over to outsiders. Managers can’t be vague.”

Building the On-Demand Workforce. By: Joseph B. Fuller, Manjari Raman, James Palano, Allison Bailey, Nithya Vaduganathan, Elizabeth Kaufman, Renée Laverdière, & Sibley Lovett. Harvard Business School, Managing The Future of Work, Research

12 ways companies can compete in the talent acquisition market. Fast Company

Emerging Talent Platforms Filling The Gaps Created By Disruptive Market Forces. By Roomy Khan. Forbes