Here's what we've learnt.
TheTin started in 2001 in a small back room at our good mates' agency, Three Blind Mice, in Charlotte Mews just off Tottenham Court Road, not far from where we still are now in Soho.
Tim and I borrowed a couple of grand each from our dads, bought two computers and put down the deposit on the room. We didn't have a plan for 25 years. I'm not sure we had a plan for five.
Some of the early jobs paid in unusual ways. Mean Fiddler paid us in bags of cash, taken straight from the venue's collection that night. From Waterford Wedgwood we ended up with crystal decanters and copper-bottomed pans that are still going strong. But most of what we've done since has been for global professional services firms, who have thankfully paid in the normal way.
From very early on, we could see marketing leaders in those firms deal with more complexity than they often get credit for.
Keeping a brand consistent across teams that each have their own priorities. Aligning partners with different views of what the brand should be. Navigating procurement processes that can slow a good idea down before it gets anywhere. And now, working in a market where AI increasingly decides who gets found before a human does.
So we’ve learned to revel in those briefs that take a bit of unpicking.
The ones where the business model matters as much as the marketing brief. Where the stakeholder map is complicated. Where different people have different versions of what success looks like.
Because a lot of what looks like a brand, marketing or digital problem is also an organisational one.
The difficult part isn't always coming up with the answer. It's understanding the twelve people who need to agree on it, what matters to each of them and what it will take to move everyone forward. Misjudge that and a great idea can go nowhere.
We once spent three months building a 3D globe interface for a Dutch architect, based on his own detailed drawings and specification, who then decided it was a stupid idea and refused to pay.
And what all of that gives you, if you pay attention, is pattern recognition. We've seen the same problem wearing different clothes across decades of briefs. and we've learnt from them, evolved how we work and built that learning into how we approach every one.. We call it compound intelligence. It's the accumulated knowledge of every complicated brief we've taken on.
What comes next
Over the last year, we've been building an internal tool that turns 25 years of TheTin’s project knowledge into something our team can use every day, and it's shown us what compound intelligence looks like when it's actually working. It's built on our own history, which is the one thing nobody else can have.
We're now turning some of that compound intelligence into practical ways to help professional services firms understand and tackle their own complexity.
The first is a complexity diagnostic: a way of getting underneath the brief to understand the real shape of the problem before deciding how to solve it.
The second looks at The Expertise Gap: how firms can turn the expertise that already exists inside their business into something the market actually sees.
There'll be more on both shortly.
So in short, the complicated ones are where we do our best work. They always have been.
Twenty-five years doesn't change what we do. It gives us a better way of explaining why we do it, what we've learned and why that experience matters to the clients we work with.
If you've got a complicated brief, we're all ears.
Jamie
CEO, TheTin
