Pioneering Happiness and Autonomy in Digital Marketing: The Case of Cyberclick
Cyberclick, a Barcelona-based digital marketing agency, has spent the last decade refining a model of work rooted in autonomy, transparency, and happiness. Founded in 1999 by David Tomás, the company began with a goal that remainsunchanged: to create a workplace where people look forward to Mondays. While its early innovations in performance-based online advertising helped it gain traction in the Spanish market, it is the company’s distinctive work culture that has drawn wider attention in recent years.
This blog post is part of 80+ case studies of progressive organizations we created for the ZeroDX awards 2025. These organizations embody the principles of RenDanHeYi in their work structures:
Zero Distance to customer: Decision what to build is based on insights from the marketplace
Autonomy: Small teams with full decision-making autonomy enable speed in execution
Shared Rewards: Everyone in the micro-enterprise participates in its financial success.
Cyberclick Spain now operates with around 100 people, working in small autonomous teams that are empowered tomake decisions close to the customer. Each team, typically between 8 and 16 people, steers its own projects without middle managers or departmental silos. The structure isn’t sold as radical; it just feels practical to those inside it. With no buffer between employees and their clients, customer feedback arrives unfiltered and drives real-time action. While Cyberclick doesn’t use RenDanHeYi vocabulary, this clear sense of proximity and ownership echoes the zero-distance principle.
Cyberclick’s approach to goals avoids the abstract planning processes common in larger firms. Individuals define their own objectives, and these roll up into team and company-wide targets. This bottom-up clarity ensures that ambition is anchored in reality. Rather than coerce alignment, the structure encourages it to emerge naturally. In RenDanHeYi terms, the idea of value co-creation comes alive here, not through frameworks but through work that feels personal.
Leadership takes a deliberately light touch. David Tomás, the founder, plays more of a cultural coach than a decision-maker. He provides inspiration, not instruction. The organizational system doesn’t rely on hierarchy to move work forward. Instead, what matters is clarity of values and trust in the team’s judgment. This role resembles the enabling function of the platform owner in RenDanHeYi, though at Cyberclick the metaphor is less theory and more habit.
Hiring is approached with similar care. Candidates are evaluated by future teammates and must pass a multi-week trial before joining. At the end, they are offered a choice: accept a full-time role, or walk away with a bonus. No one has taken the money. While this mechanism stands out, its real function is cultural calibration, a mutual check that everyone is choosing the same journey. The dynamic parallels the contract-based relationships in RenDanHeYi, though again, Cyberclick arrives there by intuition.
Transparency at Cyberclick is both financial and emotional. Everyone learns how to read the business numbers,and profit-sharing follows when certain benchmarks are met. But the more distinct layer is the shared responsibilityfor wellbeing. Team members check in on happiness regularly. If something is off, it’s addressed before performance suffers. These aren’t HR initiatives; they are rhythms baked into the daily flow. In this sense, the company has developed a kind of built-in feedback loop, a continuous pulse on the system’s health.
Work arrangements are famously flexible. Employees manage their own schedules and time off, with no approvals required, just mutual respect. This setup isn’t about freedom as much as it is about trust. The unspoken rule is simple: do what you promise, and do it well. The absence of bureaucracy is not chaotic; it reflects a mature social contract. This resonates with the spirit of RenDanHeYi’s self-regulating teams, though expressed here through daily routines rather than policy.
Cyberclick also nurtures broader development. People receive training budgets with no strings attached and areencouraged to apply their skills in support of local nonprofits. These acts are not treated as fringe benefits. They reinforce the idea that professional growth is incomplete without personal meaning, a view that aligns with RenDanHeYi’s broader vision of human-centered value creation.
Externally, Cyberclick operates more like a federation of boutique consultancies than a traditional agency. Each team manages its own client relationships and service offerings. Adjustments are made on the fly, and decisions don’t wait for approvals. The result is responsiveness and relevance, two qualities essential in a field defined by rapid change.This modular way of working reflects many of the same strengths attributed to micro-enterprises in RenDanHeYi: accountability, focus, and speed.
Cyberclick Spain may not formally label itself a RenDanHeYi company, but it consistently demonstrates many of the model’s most powerful principles through action. Its practices, from distributed decision-making to integrated personaland team goals, reflect a lived commitment to the same ideals. These parallels highlight how the spirit of RenDanHeYi can thrive outside its original context, and how its relevance is expanding far beyond manufacturing or China.
Cyberclick shows that when trust, ownership, and purpose are given room to grow, the essence of the model can flourish even without the name.
