L’AGENCY is celebrating its fifth anniversary this year and that’s not only an anniversary for L’AGENCY, but also for me. This November will mark five years since I joined L’AGENCY, an agency that at that time had just become a B.V. in a digital world that, like me at the time, was still at the beginning of its career.
Our first office at the Singel was located in the heart of Amsterdam where I, together with Lena and a small team (there were five of us at the time) were one of the first talent agencies to storm the path of social media. With my experience as an Artist Manager at a former agency for hair & make-up artists, stylists and illustrators, I knew what it was like to interact with both creatives and a client at the same time. However, they mainly came from an industry where you presented yourself with an offline portfolio (print), and online presence was definitely not something a large part of the creative industry saw the added value. At L’AGENCY, I learned differently. As Project Manager at the time, I worked with some of the first talents with a large reach on Instagram and names that were well known in the media or from blogs and vlogs before Instagram was even a thing. There were no rules back then in the new digital world, and I can definitely say that a lot has changed since then.
Now I realize what a special time it actually was. This sounds like I am talking about a long time ago, but five years in this fast-changing world where so much is happening, actually is a long time. At L’AGENCY, we received a lot of gifting packages for the talents, so the bell rang all day. Without any mention of it beforehand, the most beautiful items were sent to our office in the hopes of our talents sharing something about it with a mention to the relevant brands. Nowadays we receive an email in advance and everything is registered. We sometimes say no to gifting because we want to keep our paid partners exclusive and are not able to guarantee content in return for gifing, but also for sustainability reasons. On top of this, a huge amount has also changed in the back office in terms of data. Five years ago there were almost no agreements about results to be achieved and we mainly only looked at the number of likes of the agreed content, or how many followers a creator had. Screenshots of the statistics from the accounts were almost not asked for back then and were more of an extra than a must. We soon came up with the idea of creating a statistics reporting pdf with all the screenshots together, and highlighting the overall results. This was very enthusiastically received by clients and became a regular part of our project management. Five years later everything is calculated and we talk about KPI’s, CPM, ER and CTR and these calculations are part of not only the last step in project management (in our statistics reporting) but also part of the first step in making agreements with a client. Because of this we are now constantly updating numbers, making new calculations and keeping everything up to date on the backhand. I think this is one of the biggest things that people don’t know about our work and I can say that everything has become so much more professional.
Four L’AGENCY offices later, we have literally and figuratively grown as a company in this increasingly professional digital world, and not only L’AGENCY but also I as a person. Within my current role as Head of Talents, I now manage a greatly talented team with creative and hardworking colleagues in our beautiful office at the Kerkstraat, and work with the nicest talents who do not only bring good vibes online but especially offline, and who I sometimes talk to more often than my boyfriend. After almost five years it is still the most fun to work with so many different personalities, where I try to find a personalised vision for every new request and meeting and where we really work together as a strategic team together with a brand. In this way campaigns are the most fun but also feel the most natural and we get the best of the best out of it. We have also noticed this appreciation from clients, many of whom we have been working with for years and with whom I have built a great relationship. It’s even more fun to maintain that connection through face to face appointments at press days and going to the most beautiful events, where we also see each other offline. That value in the digital world still remains very important, as does our quarterly team event we plan with the office team after each quarter to cheers to success together. As a result, that #lagencyfamily feeling actually came very naturally. Something that makes me proud to go into my fifth anniversary this coming November.
Cheers to L’AGENCY!
Ruby Franken
Head of Talents
