We Sold Care For $2.50.

November 11, 2013. 6:30am.

I'm in a taxi, leaving the agency. Everything was made by hand back then. No AI. No shortcuts. Just you and the work until one of you gave up.

I didn't give up.

I look exhausted in the photo. But not defeated. I'd stayed all night because something wasn't right and I couldn't let it go. Nobody asked me to stay. Nobody paid for those hours. The client would have been happy with what we had at midnight.

But I wasn't.

So I stayed.

And sitting in that taxi, watching Barcelona wake up, I felt proud.

I thought I was caring about craft.

And to all my knowledge, I was right. I was caring.

But I was also building a monster.

A time-hungry business model that's in shambles today. An industry that trained itself to sell care for nothing and expect someone to donate the difference forever.

You want to see what that looks like now?

Last year, Omnicom and IPG announced they're merging. Not because they're winning. Because they can't survive alone. Two giants, $13 billion deal, and the first thing they promise? $750 million in cost synergies. You know what that means. Thousands of jobs gone. Again, careless.

IPG had already cut 3,200 people in 2024. Omnicom shed 3,000. And now they're looking to cut another 10% of staff costs. These aren't numbers on a spreadsheet. These are people who learned to care in this industry. People who probably stayed late more times than they can count.

The same holding companies that were built on decades of donated care, all those nights, all those weekends, all that unpaid obsession, are now collapsing into each other. Vacating office space. Slashing headcount. Desperately trying to squeeze out enough savings to stay alive.

Why?

Because the business model was never sustainable.

They sold excellence for the price of mediocrity and bet that people would keep donating the difference forever.

They bet wrong.

Look, I'm not saying this is the only thing that fucked the industry. It's not.

Consultancies invaded and bought up agencies like they were collecting baseball cards. Accenture alone spent over a billion dollars in 2017 acquiring creative shops, and suddenly we're competing with McKinsey and Deloitte for creative work.

Google killed third-party cookies, ending 20 years of tracking and targeting that the whole programmatic ecosystem was built on.

AI is commoditizing production faster than anyone predicted, making it cheaper to create more mediocre work at scale.

And the quality crisis is real. Everyone knows it. Advertisers, agencies, publishers, they all cite quality as their primary concern. But nobody wants to pay to fix it.

So yeah, a lot of things killed the industry.

But here's what makes the unsustainable care model different: it's the one thing we did to ourselves.

The consultancies invaded because we let them. Cookies died because we abused them. AI is replacing us because we made ourselves replaceable.

But selling care for $2.50? That was our choice. We built that. We normalized it. We made it the standard.

And now we're living with what happens when you build an empire on donated labour.

Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud.

When working late is the only way to produce excellent work, the system is already broken.

Excellent work costs time. Time costs money. But we sold it for $2.50 and expected someone to donate the difference. That someone was always the person who cared most.

Every time you stayed late to make something right that the budget didn't pay for, you were stealing from yourself to subsidize a client who wouldn't pay for craft.

We called that passion. I call it theft.

Jony Ive's team shot one flower for 285 hours. Over 24,000 shots. Just so you might smile when you look at your wrist.

You know why Apple could do that? Because they charged for it.

The cost of shooting a flower for 285 hours was baked into the price of the watch. The cost of finishing the back of the drawer was built into the business model.

When Ive said someone unwrapping a cable and thinking "somebody gave a shit" was "a spiritual thing," he wasn't romanticizing unpaid overtime. He was describing a business that valued care enough to pay for it.

Meanwhile in advertising, we decided care should be free.

We wrapped it in beautiful language. This is a passion business. We do it for the love of the work. Great creatives obsess over details.

All prettier ways of saying we're not paying you to care, but we expect you to do it anyway.

And we did. Because we were young. Because we wanted to prove ourselves. Because we believed caring about craft mattered more than getting paid for it.

The industry looked at all that donated labour and said, perfect. That's the business model.

You want to know why the work keeps getting worse?

It's because the people who used to donate their care for free finally did the math.

They looked at that taxi ride at 6am and realized I just worked 14 hours for free to cover up the fact that we sold this project too cheap.

So they stopped. And the industry acts shocked that nobody wants to stay late anymore.

Here's what I wish someone had told that kid in the taxi.

The work needed 20 hours to be excellent. The agency sold 8. And you're donating 12 to make up the difference.

Caring about craft isn't free. It never was. You can't deliver $10 worth of care on a $2.50 budget unless someone donates the difference.

For decades, that someone was us. We subsidized an entire industry's inability to charge what craft actually costs.

So when people say nobody cares about craft anymore, what they actually mean is nobody's willing to donate their labor to cover up our pricing problem.

When they say this generation doesn't have the same work ethic, they mean this generation did the math.

When they say advertising is dying, they mean we built an industry on donated care and we're running out of donors.

Maybe that kid in the taxi was caring about craft.

Actually, he was. He absolutely was.

The problem wasn't him caring. The problem was an industry that saw all that care and decided not to charge for it.

They saw people staying late, obsessing over details, perfecting things nobody asked for, and instead of thinking "we should price this properly," they thought "great, free labour."

They built a business model on the assumption that someone would always donate the difference between what craft costs and what clients want to pay.

Until we couldn't anymore.

So when I look at that photo now, I don't see someone doing it wrong.

I see someone who cared in an industry that didn't care enough to make caring sustainable.

And that's why we are where we are today.

The saddest part? The industry still doesn't understand what it lost.

It looks at people leaving at 5pm and thinks they don't care anymore.

If you want advertising to care about craft again, it starts with charging for it.

Build the time into the budget. Price the obsession into the model. Stop expecting someone to donate the difference between good and excellent.