Season 3 Episode 4: Morgan Graham
Morgan Graham is a Partner and Chief Experience Officer at Experiences For Mankind, a San Diego based creative consultancy, with an ethos of preventing agency burnout and promoting work life balance. Morgan has been a marketing instructor at the University of San Diego, and is a long-term mentor in San Diego State University’s AZTEC mentorship programme. She is also on the board of Dent the Future, which brings together entrepreneurs, executives, and creatives who want to create positive and lasting global change.
We chat about:
Morgan’s amazing journey starting as an intern at Experiences for Mankind to now being partner
Client servicing and strategy
Meeting client needs without sacrificing the needs of team members
How it’s possible to have agency ethos of preventing burnout
Check out below some of my favourite quotes from our discussion and listen to our full conversation on apple podcasts or spotify.
Jumping into strategy
Because our staff was nimble and had to wear all these hats I really had to dive myself into the strategy component to understand the why…why we’re doing this and why the client needs it, what is the best case scenarios in the retail experience for the customer experience to come together. I jumped into it head first. The sony account turned into a 7 figure account fairly fast and it was 4 of us managing it. It was an awesome experience to have that early in my career.
The negatives when a team can get too top heavy
I call it the German chocolate cake, where there is so many layers by the time it gets completed how did it even get done as so many people need to see it and have opinions whether objective or subjective to get to the end point. Our agency did get to that point where we felt it was too large and we were just throwing people at it. Our German chocolate cake got too tall. Today we’ve kept ourselves small, senior, nimble and not have such a giant amount of individuals on projects, so we can have that room and space and ownership of work.
Why it’s OK to have a little friction in the client relationship
Those are my favourite types of client relationships, where there is a little bit of friction and challenging between the two. We manage the digital retail programme for Microsoft, we’re fully embedded with their team and it’s very much a partnership, and sometimes we push back and sometimes they push back to us, and it’s awesome and even better ideas come out of that. We’ve been partnering together for 5 years, at the end of the day we both know we’re coming to the table trying to do the best work and trying to create the best outcomes. When the trust is there and that bit of friction is there, that’s where the cool work starts to happen.
Preventing agency burnout and staying relevant to attract creative talent
I call every single advertising agency partner, lead, executive, whomever, that the stereotypical way of running an advertising agency doesn’t need to be. You do not need to burn out your team, you do not need to have high turnover. you don’t need poor culture. I don’t understand why we don’t see past it and see through it. We’ve intentionally tried to change the game of what it means to work in an advertising agency and it’s paid off. A lot of our team members have stayed with us for 8 years now, we don’t have a high turnover. But it’s also been hard to recruit right now as that stereotype of agencies has remained alongside other factors. To recruit it’s beyond just the salary, it’s beyond these little petty things you’re doing in the office, what’s the lifestyle that you can bring to these individuals, what’s the type of work you’re bringing in and saying yes to for the team to do. Do you have the team’s heart and minds and spirits in mind when you’re making business decisions, because if you’re not no wonder you’re not keeping teams or recruiting team properly. I really hope agency leaders are going to wake up otherwise we’re all going to have problems staffing great creative talent.
Links to some of the stuff we chatted about:
Experiences for Mankind