As we celebrate the best places to work, let’s begin by raising a glass not only to the winners, but to any company that managed to create a collaborative culture and grow a business during another year of living dysfunctionally.

The perpetual pandemic has led to the so-called Great Resignation, so all the companies that reduced their staff prematurely during the first year of the zombie apocalypse are now scrambling to retain and hire enough talent to keep up with the work.

The firms that held fast and took good care of their employees, many of which are celebrated in Best Places to Work 2022, find themselves in a much stronger position to maintain momentum, accelerate and grow. These companies understood the value in having values, and the ripple effect across the marketing industry was profound.

Talent recognized that this is a talent business, after all.

The people who make business possible—the ideators, creators and collaborators—realized they hold all the cards. The option to work for a place that unleashes your best self has disrupted the corporate approach to filling boxes on a staffing chart. This puts a premium on culture and changes expectations for leadership as the bottom line is now inextricably linked to employee satisfaction.

Let’s face it, managing a bunch of individuals at scale is far different from managing a company full of people coming to work to earn a paycheck. For all the talk of creativity and disruption we hear at marketing conferences, the reality is big client organizations and large agencies aren’t set up—structurally or culturally—to accommodate a bunch of iconoclastic creators.

In their futile alchemic attempts to turn creativity into data and marketing into science, these firms emphasized process over play. That looks good on the balance sheet, since procurement always prefers order over chaos, but where’s the fun in that? The wake-up call from the pandemic has been a collective crisis over how we spend our days.

The companies that figured this out are thriving, because the Great Resignation across the marketing industry isn’t about people quitting, it’s about people searching—a mass migration to find the promised land of creativity from whence we came. A quest to rediscover the time before independent agencies and startup brands got gobbled up by corporate giants.

With the entire concept of work in flux, it might be worth reflecting on a few observations from some famous hard-workers whose insights seem particularly relevant right now.

“Work is much more fun than fun.” —Noël Coward

Our industry used to be fun, and it still feels that way within select companies. A great agency or brand team feels like an extended family, a sports team or a late karaoke night with a bunch of strangers who drank just enough to believe they can harmonize like the Spice Girls as long as you buy the next round.

The pandemic has made us all paranoid, preachy and too damn earnest. If you’re serious about the work, then don’t take yourself—or your clients and co-workers—too seriously. Creativity thrives in fun environments, so loosen those laces if you want to run faster. 

“Everybody wants to be famous, but nobody wants to do the work.” —Kevin Hart

Famous campaigns are the social currency of the marketing world. Well-known work is why agencies get called by pitch consultants, why talent takes a call from a headhunter and why CMOs can jump to bigger brands after their increasingly short tenures come to an end.

But fame doesn’t come easily, and it usually doesn’t come quickly. Look up the IMDB credits for any major actor and you’ll find all the non-speaking roles they had before anyone put them on a movie poster. The marketing industry is moving faster than ever, and the panicky pacing of the last two years has shifted from impatience to demanding desperation on the part of both clients and chief creative officers anxious to prove themselves quickly.

But that’s not how it works, because unless you’ve built an effective campaign, most clients won’t stick their necks out for a single execution, no matter how brilliant. They get paid to put numbers on the board, and unless you’ve been in the trenches with them, clients won’t make a leap of faith toward something that’s never been seen before. Marketing clients lack clout with their management teams until they prove marketing is an investment and not an expense, and an agency lacks credibility until it’s built a campaign that’s an engine of success.

Behind the rankings: Ad Age World’s Largest Advertisers 2021

See all of Ad Age’s 2021 Marketers of the Year here.

And the answer to this dilemma isn’t data. (The answer is never data.)

Even for famous brands, less than 10% of the work wins awards for this reason. Greatness is a stamina game, but too many talented people in our short attention span industry seek instant gratification and don’t want to put in the hours, days and weekends needed to get there.

“Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.”  —Stephen King

That thought might scare you, because Stephen King is a spooky guy, but at a time when industry dialogue is fixated on working remotely, work-life balance, unlimited vacation and passion pursuits outside the office—all of which are valuable and appealing—you’re still up against a type-A marketer somewhere and their obsessive creative team willing to come up with 50 concepts to find the winning idea.

“I put my heart and soul into my work and have lost my mind in the process.”  —Vincent van Gogh

But in case you weren’t listening, no one is saying you have to cut off your ear to kick ass at your job. Late-night texting with colleagues has devolved into nonstop Zooms with clients, so unless you protect yourself and disconnect whenever possible, you will go crazy. Work hard but set boundaries, because nobody else will, even at the best of companies. 

Find the tipping point between work and fun, and if you get that balance right, you just might find they become one and the same.

See Ad Age’s 2021 Year in Review here.

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