Madison Avenue Makeover: The Transformation of Huge and the Redefinition of the Ad Agency Business

Madison Avenue Makeover chronicles Huge's change of mission, its new product strategy, its reorganization from twelve independent global offices to one single global operation, and its revolutionary three-dimensional pod organizational structure involving client partners, crafts and products.

Huge's transformation set out to correct the fatal deficiencies of the ad agency business: creative work that has little impact, declining prices and fees for agency services and commodity-like relationships that are unrewarding for clients and agencies alike.

The transformation is largely complete. What remains is to see how Huge performs in the marketplace with its new mission and products. All commercial signs are encouraging. The new products are selling well.

Baxter is Australian and only 44 years old, but he has a wealth of industry turnaround experience behind him. He learned the media business at Zenith in Australia, and he later became a co-founder of Naked Australia, CEO of UM Australia and the Global CEO of Initiative, IPG's media agency in the U.S.

Huge is Baxter's first creative agency gig. He was appointed by Philippe Krakowsky, IPG's CEO, to turn Huge around. Baxter left Initiative and joined Huge in June 2021.

During the past sixteen months, Huge's Executive Leadership Team (ELT) conducted three offsite retreats. The first retreat, in October 2021, created agreement on Huge's growth acceleration mission for clients. The second retreat, in May 2022, reviewed the progress of more than twenty related change projects led by ELT members. The third retreat, in October 2022, examined the functioning of the new organization and fine-tuned its operations.

Throughout, Huge benefited from the involvement of The Business Model Company (TBMC), a London-based specialized consulting firm that focuses on company transformations.

During 2022, ELT was running "old Huge" and setting the stage for "new Huge" -- delivering its budgeted numbers to IPG while beginning to sell its innovative approach and product lines to new customers.

The current organizational challenge is how to develop a new global company culture with employees who have been working remotely for more than two years and have expressed a desire to continue to work remotely.

Baxter and ELT understand that remote working is effective for certain types of work, like progress reviews and information exchanges, but strategic and creative thinking for clients require something more substantive, like face-to-face brainstorming meetings in physical locations. Huge sees itself as a "flexible workplace," allowing remote working when appropriate, but believing that face-to-face work is still required, particularly for developing high value-added client work.

Huge is not alone among companies in thinking about how to work more effectively in the post-COVID environment. However, with a new mission, a suite of new products, a new global organization and the positive buzz from working in a transformed company under a new CEO, Huge believes that it is in strong position to take on the challenges of 2023 and beyond.

The book documents the intensive effort required by the CEO and the ELT to dig Huge out of the industry's hole. Are there lessons for other agencies? Certainly, but as the Huge story clearly shows, transformation is not for the faint of heart. It takes more than winning new clients and investing in creative capabilities to transform an agency.

Madison Avenue Makeover will be released in June 2023 and will be available on Amazon and at other booksellers.

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