There was a time (and it wasn’t that long ago) when certain accounts were the ones every ambitious creative in an ad agency wanted to work on. Airlines, alcohol brands, cars – these were the sought-after briefs with big budgets and the potential for high-profile, award-winning campaigns. Getting your hands on one of these briefs was the mark of having truly arrived in the agency and industry. And for good reason, because the creative work that was generated often defined both ad agencies and entire eras of British advertising. Think ‘World’s favourite airline’, ‘I bet he drinks Carling Black Label’ and ‘If only everything in life was as reliable as a VW’.
But times may be changing. Because if a recruitment process, we’ve just been through means anything, there’s a shift in the types of brand people want to work on and why.
Fifty quality applications in 3 days
When RDP recently put out a LinkedIn post for a senior creative, we weren’t quite prepared for the response. It seemed quite a low-key entry to the recruitment process, yet 50 applications arrived in just 3 days – enough to make us pause the process to take stock well ahead of schedule. That alone would have been remarkable. But it was the quality of those applications that really stopped us in our tracks.
The initial 50 were whittled down to 17, then to 8 for interview, and finally to a shortlist of 3. And running through almost every conversation was a theme that, frankly, none of us had anticipated quite so consistently. These were people who had worked on some of the biggest global brands imaginable – household names, huge campaigns. And here they were, actively seeking out a specialist agency working in agribusiness and animal health.
The pull of purpose
When the candidates were asked directly what had prompted them to apply, the answers were grouped around two main themes:
The first was the appeal of a genuinely specialist agency – one with deep, interconnected knowledge of its sector, rather than a generalist shop happy to take on whatever brief walked through the door.
But the second reason was more powerful still. They wanted to work in what they themselves described as a ‘meaningful sector’. Some had worked in agencies focused on fintech and fashion. They’d had enough of pure consumerism. They wanted to feel that the work they were doing could make a genuine difference – in food production, in protecting the environment, in nourishing mental wellbeing.
Agriculture, they rightly felt, sits right at the heart of all of those things. As one candidate said “When I read your job description and had a look at your website, I just thought this is an agency that has a purpose. In a sector that actually means something.”
Why this matters for agriculture
Of course this is all wonderful news for RDP. But anyone that knows me well will guess that’s not the main reason for writing this article. Because it’s worth pausing on what our recruitment process actually signals.
Most creative talent in this country has historically been drawn to city-based agencies working on urban consumer brands. That’s where the money is, where the accolades are handed out, where reputations are made. I doubt if agriculture has ever featured in that conversation.
But the candidates coming through our door had already started to scratch beneath the surface. They understood that modern agriculture is not the bad guy headlines sometimes suggest. They’d grasped its complexity, its role in stewardship of the countryside, sustainability, its sheer technical sophistication. They knew it was a sector grappling – openly, honestly and publicly – with some of the biggest challenges facing our world today. With the power to help solve them.
And they wanted to be part of it.
A changing landscape for creative talent
It would be naive of me to ignore the broader context. AI disruption has rattled the creative industry significantly, and economic uncertainty has led many agencies to cut senior talent rather than junior staff – it’s a quicker way to hit a savings target. Some of the people we spoke to were in permanent roles. Others had gone freelance and were looking to return to the stability of regular employment. Both groups were alive to the disruption happening around them.
What was interesting was how they viewed AI itself. Some had limited exposure; others were already using it as a core tool in their day-to-day work. And they were encouraged to find an agency that was engaging with AI openly – not hiding behind it but actively exploring how it could help agriculture communicate more effectively. At RDP, that has included launching tools to help visualise and animate 2D information, convert written content into podcast formats, track campaign performance in real time, and improve visibility within AI-driven search environments.
Far from being put off by the sector’s perceived rurality or niche status, these candidates saw our own embrace of new technology as evidence that agriculture itself is not stuck in the past or standing still.
Agriculture should be proud
So the real message here isn’t just about one agency’s recruitment drive. It’s about what it says more broadly. There is a pull from wider society toward sectors that are doing something real, something necessary, something connected to the real-world people live in. Agriculture is one of those sectors. And it should feel good about that.
If agriculture can attract that kind of talent – people who arrive already passionate, already engaged, already understanding why it matters – then maybe the question isn’t whether it can compete with the old ‘glamour’ sectors of advertising. The airlines, booze and cars. It’s whether those sectors can compete with us!
