Hi ARTIES, Steven here.
Big update, We are finally putting a meter on ARTISH. From this month, usage across the app is tokenised, and everyone in an organisation draws from the same pool. Admins decide how that pool behaves: they can cap each teammate at a set number of tokens per billing period, or leave it open and let the whole team use it freely, and the pool itself can be pre-paid or post-paid depending on an organisation's SLA with us. Our own org runs on caps, 2,000 tokens a head against a 10,000-token month.
We built it this way for a boring reason, which is that two of the six agency leaders we spoke to this month told us about a budget that went wrong because the people doing the work couldn't see the money. We would rather not be one more.
Dropbox: Dropbox now connects to ARTISH the same way Google Drive does, so your files stay where they are, nothing gets migrated, and the work is still reachable from inside ARTISH. Not every agency lives on Google, and the ones that don't shouldn't have to move house to use us.
The Teams bot: We are building a Microsoft Teams bot, and testing and iterating on it heavily before it goes anywhere near a client, because this one came straight out of the research. Andrew McWiggan's 40-person agency, Acart, runs on Teams and SharePoint. Kerri Michell at Phoenix Group in Saskatchewan told us plainly why hers can't leave: "most of our clients, because they are government, use Teams.
Documentation: We are also improving our public documentation at artish.world/help, which now walks through projects, timesheets, invoicing, the assistant in Slack and WhatsApp, and our integrations. Brent Vollick told us William Joseph rolled out Hive last year, with training for every department, and is still working out the kinks. Undocumented work gets defined by other people, and software is no different.
What we learned from industry conversation this month
The story going around is that the agency of record is dead, and there is evidence for it. RP3 runs a core of about 30 full-time people and a large contractor bench, and Beth Johnson says project-based work has forced her to split account leadership in two, with delivery measured on profitability and client success measured on relationships and organic growth. But Andrew says roughly 70% of Acart's work is still AOR, Kerri has clients of 20 years, and Jenny Smith at Raya thinks the project-work wave peaked five to eight years ago, with clients now coming back to agencies for judgement on AI. Whether the AOR survives depends less on the agency than on who its clients are.
Government doesn't churn.
On why projects break, nearly everyone reached for the same word first. Communication. Brent Vollick at William Joseph went further, and it's worth taking seriously because it cuts against anyone selling software, us included: "most of the gaps that we have today at an agency are behavioural issues that need to change. Nothing to do with the tool." He is right that no dashboard fixes a person who has decided not to look at one.
But look at where the breakdowns actually happened. At William Joseph, a TV spot with a $120,000 budget went $10,000 over in concepting before anyone raised a flag, and at Raya, Jenny's team under-quoted a lottery client because the estimate left out the animator and the post house. Jenny's fix wasn't a pep talk, it was putting budgets where the whole team can see them, and push back, before the client ever does.
Behaviour follows visibility.
The other pattern is that agency software keeps winning the paperwork and losing the conversation. Beth replaced RP3's old system because, in her words, "It was pain. It was pain. It was pain." Three months into Scoro, "we've got timesheets down, we've got invoicing down," and her team still talks in Slack and email. John Line at Copacino tried to centralise on Wrike, watched conversation scatter across Wrike, email and Teams, and moved everyone to Slack instead.
None of this is an argument against tools, it's an argument about where they sit. Agencies will move their invoices for you, but they will not move their conversations, and the software that keeps asking them to is the software they end up abandoning.