When design agency Collins decided to ditch its 10,000-square-foot, top-floor office space in New York’s Greenwich Village last summer, founder and chief creative officer Brian Collins didn’t want to simply move to another office; he wanted to develop something else entirely. So he went back to the drawing board and started brainstorming.

“I wanted to create a space that doesn’t feel like an office,” says Collins, who founded the shop that bears his name in 2008. Now, with completion just a few weeks away, the agency’s made-to-order headquarters will feel less like a traditional workspace and more like a cross between “your favorite coffee shop and your favorite bookstore,” he says. 

No longer nestled in Manhattan, the creative shop’s new “laboratory” will occupy a 3,000-square-foot former retail space in Brooklyn that includes all the necessary business features of its former space plus creative amenities like a library, meditation room and communal work area. “We didn’t need peoples’ 50 individual desks. It didn’t make any sense,” he says, calling the ad industry’s pre-pandemic office model “irrelevant.”

The new Williamsburg headquarters is designed to comfortably accommodate 25 employees—less than half of Collins’ staff—as the agency transitions to a hybrid schedule of both remote and in-person work. Moving forward, going into the office will be 100% voluntary, Collins adds. “We’re supporting people to work wherever and however they wish.”

Collins’ mantra is one that has started to sound increasingly familiar on Madison Avenue in recent months as New York ad agencies, big and small, begin thinking about the future of productivity and how the COVID-19 pandemic will impact work spaces in the long-run.

At the top of many agendas: downsizing. This has less to do with shrinking the creative workforce—although layoffs have been an inevitable component of the pandemic’s industry toll—and more with shedding high-dollar real estate that is of little use when the bulk of New York agency employees find themselves working remotely.

Industry-wide downsizing

During an earnings call in June, Omnicom Media Group’s CEO John Wren confirmed the company would be cutting more than 1 million square feet of office space globally in a bid to help save hundreds of millions of dollars annually. One month later, Interpublic Group of Cos. CEO Michael Roth followed suit, saying the group would shave 500,000 square feet of real estate across all of its offices, as part of what he called “permanent changes.”

Omnicom owns a host of creative shops including BBDO, DDB and TBWA/Chiat/Day, while IPG’s vast portfolio includes FCB, MullenLowe and R/GA.

WPP and M&C Saatchi both came to similar conclusions, the former affecting its New York locations such as Ogilvy’s massive 11th Avenue headquarters and the latter impacting international offices in Australia, Singapore and the U.K.

Creative shops have been forced to adapt to new changes extremely rapidly since the pandemic began last year, Amy Armstrong, the new global CEO of IPG-owned media agency Initiative, recently told Ad Age. “It’s not going to go back, ever, to what it was,” says Armstrong.

“There’ll be some talent that will never need to be in the office,” Armstrong says, noting that many agencies’ employees have relocated—in some instances, permanently so—farther away from their offices than ever before. That will help justify the downsizing undertaken by many large shops, though managers should remember to apply work-from-home rules with equity so remote workers aren’t at a disadvantage, Armstrong adds.

According to 2019 data collected from 4A's members, agency office space expenses represent between 7% and 12% of revenues for most agencies, clocking in at slightly more than 9% on average.

The trend of shrinking offices has led many creative industry leaders on Madison Avenue to rethink how they approach the structure of work—and even snag a good deal for those looking to expand their footprint.

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity in real estate,” says Michael Duda, managing partner at New York agency Bullish, which is actively exploring an expansion this year.

After Bullish’s lease on its Chinatown office expired in July 2020, it took its show on the road and transitioned to a fully remote work schedule while agency leaders pondered their options. They considered keeping most staff remote after the pandemic ends and meeting face-to-face only once per quarter, Duda says, but ultimately the choice was made to slowly transition people back into the office once it’s safe to do so. “The world can’t revolve around Zoom alone,” he adds. “Humans are social creatures.”

At the agency’s new headquarters, which is currently being looked for from Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood up to Union Square, Duda says employees will be expected to come in frequently, though it would be “tone deaf and un-empathetic” to mandate an immediate return to a five-day, in-person workweek. The configuration of Bullish’s future office will consider the needs and concerns of workers, too, with private bathrooms and low-capacity breakout spaces both on its real estate checklist.

Many New York agencies are likely to follow suit, Duda says, though he suspects a handful of creative shops will likely find their post-pandemic footing thousands of miles from Madison Avenue—perhaps in the increasingly popular climes of Austin, Miami and Nashville.

Duda, like Collins and many other creative veterans, recognizes the importance of in-person work. He says Bullish is hoping to lease anywhere from 70% to 100% more office space than it previously had at its 3,000-square-foot HQ—more real estate than the agency likely needs at this point, he concedes—assuming Bullish can find a solid deal.

“Part of it is we’re growing, part of it is the buyer has control,” Duda says of the search for a new office, which he hopes to snap up for at least 20% below the stated asking price.

Mother New York took things in the same direction last August, pulling the trigger on a 15-year lease of a 61,000-square-foot space at the new Roulston House commercial development in Gowanus, Brooklyn—nearly doubling the size of its footprint compared to its former headquarters in the Hell’s Kitchen area of Manhattan.

“One of the ways we’re re-imagining the workspace is sort of as a creative workshop and less as an office space,” says Katie Longmyer, managing director at Mother New York.

A new-look office

Starting with a clean slate, which Mother first set in motion before the pandemic, the agency has undertaken the continuous process of examining what office features are most important and how creative employees prefer to work. The creation of a rooftop workspace, a large bar and dining area, and three-sided “stables” that will serve as a type of open-concept breakout room are all on the docket for its new office, which accounts for one of the largest leases signed in Brooklyn last year, Longmyer confirms. “Creative energy takes up a lot of space,” she adds.

While the agency’s New York-based employees continue to work from home, it has created a warehouse-turned-interim office in Brooklyn dubbed “Mother in the Middle” that staff can use for collaborative meetings and a change of scenery. It’ll also allow workers to familiarize themselves with the inter-borough commute ahead of the Gowanus headquarters’ grand opening and let the agency gauge employees’ comfort levels, Longmyer says.

If the pandemic continues to wane, Mother New York will begin transitioning some workers into its new Brooklyn office by “late spring, early summer,” with most staff set to be working in-person sometime in the fourth quarter of this year, she adds. 

Agencies seem keen to experiment post-pandemic, and some, including Mother New York and Collins, plan on opening their doors to non-employees once it is safe to do so. “Because we’re going into a new community, we wanted to invite the community into the space,” Longmyer says of the Gowanus creative crowd, fostering a collaborative, mutually symbiotic relationship that could allow the agency to establish itself more firmly in its new home.

There's an emerging notion around a “campus model,” where agencies and agency networks share services and space by partnering closer together without formal financial relationships, according to a new "Future of Work" white paper out of the 4A’s. This could take the form of co-working spaces or could result in a trend of commercial office spaces moving to provide more shared amenities. A campus model can require less total space and can serve as a “home base” from which staff, leadership and clients can meet, collaborate, create and assemble marketing programs, according to the report. These campuses can also allow agencies to provide space to prioritize health and wellness, with areas for meditation, exercise and healthy nutrition. "The features of the office likely shift from foosball tables and full bars," according to the report, "to yoga studios and organic food options."