Which advertising agency should you hire—the one with a pool or the one without?

Thank you for joining us for the second column. As one topic for this column, I'd like to share various insights about how overseas agencies work. This time, I'd like to introduce DentsuBos, our group company in Canada. We actually have quite a few overseas group companies, but among them, DentsuBos is one of the companies I'd personally love to work for.

Their Montreal office is housed in a renovated brick factory building in a warehouse district. As you can see in the photo, it features high ceilings and original flooring from the building's construction era, giving it a great look. But beyond that, the balance between functionality and playfulness is truly remarkable.

In terms of functionality, the agency houses both agency functions and production functions (departments handling video, design, digital, product, etc.) under one roof. So, when an idea strikes, you can immediately take it to a video director or designer and see it take shape right there. The shorter the distance between idea and execution, the more likely you are to develop rich, compelling concepts. In Japanese ad agencies, planning and production are often separated for efficiency, making it hard to achieve this level of intensity.

Inside the DentsuBos office. Wow, it's huge... It's actually hard to just focus on work here.

Then there's the playful aspect. First, each person's workspace is incredibly spacious. In a way, it's unnecessarily large. During meetings, you might suddenly hear applause from the far end of the spacious office. Apparently, someone won an internal fun contest. They work hard and play hard. It's wasteful. And outside, there's a pool. If asked to justify its business necessity, I'd probably struggle. That's wasteful too. But the energy generated by all this waste—while hard to quantify—is incredibly valuable.

In these times where efficiency is often prioritized above all else, I think companies—not just agencies dealing with ideas, but others too—tend to neglect this "waste" too much. Efficiency feels like a 20th-century science. If you assign work to someone who works efficiently, well, you probably won't fail. But I feel like people who can properly harness waste produce results beyond imagination. Between a company with a pool and one without, I'd want to work for the one with the pool.

I wish our Tokyo office had a bit more of a playful spirit. I'm not saying we need a pool, but... um, could we maybe get a rooftop hot spring? I'd work even harder then. Probably not gonna happen...

The pool looks like this. It's a winter photo, so it looks a bit chilly, but long freight trains occasionally pass by outside, and I find myself just staring blankly at them.