Pip Pullen — An Agency

Better with Age

Better together.

I was searching for inspiration while working on a recent financial service assignment. I visited the Bain, Boston Consulting, and McKinsey & Company websites searching for inspiration — and I found an interesting piece Bain published about the growing importance of older workers. You can read it, here.

America has long had an obsession with youth, particularly in the advertising agency business, in which 40 has long been the new 70.

Reading the Bain white paper, I began to reflect on why professional life after 60 is anything but a death sentence. Rather, it’s a time when the fog fully lifts, allowing the expertise gained over decades of repetitions to shine through.

I find that intellectual curiosity increases with time. The passion for exploring new concepts and ideas is still real.
Time sharpens focus. Fewer life distractions. Fewer political ambitions. Simply digging deeper into what is of greatest interest.
Ideas come faster, and with less preciousness about them. If the initial solution doesn’t find favor, find another. That’s a lesson of time.
Problem-solving collaboratively comes more easily when not fettered by the insecurity of youth. Simply, we know what we know.
All-in, because this is what we’re all into. My partners and I have had successful careers. We could each sunset comfortably. But it’s our shared passion for making advertising that grabs attention and stirs a visceral emotional response. That is our sunset. Because when we drive to work in the morning, we’re driving towards our ambition.

As your team evolves to fully reflect today’s workforce, make space at the table for those whose life passion fuels their daily work product. We choose to work because it’s what we love to do.

And you know what else we choose? We choose to work for you.

Give me a ring. Send me an email. Text me if you must. Let’s go. Time is wasting.

Michael
CEO

First Breckinridge Bancshares

How do seven community banks gain market share in the shadow of too-big-to-fail? By working together. With well in excess of $1 billon in assets, First Breckinridge Bancshares serves banking communities across the state, boasting seven distinct bank brands in its portfolio. In keeping with FBB’s commitment to honoring every location’s individuality, each bank had its own identity system. Campaigning on the phrase ’Where we come from,’ we leaned into FBB’s fealty to its clients and their shared sense of values, developing a common position with a shared-but-differentiating system of aesthetics.

Services Provided

Collateral
Digital Media
Graphic Branding
Paid Media
Print Design
Social Media
Website

What’s Love Got to Do with It?

Those of us who’ve been in advertising a while were raised to appreciate that nobody actually wants to look at ads. Because an ad is selling you something, and unless you specifically want that thing, or want to be reminded that you want that thing, then an ad is just one more assault on your eyeballs. So our job, as ad people, used to be to create messages that people enjoyed receiving. Gifts. Things that made people smile. Or think. Or just made them glad to encounter.

Nowadays, of course, the world of advertising has changed. Now it’s all about highly targeted, measurable offer-driven selling. We know who you are, where you are, what you want, when you want it, and how you want to hear about it. There’s no longer a need to entertain you or beguile and seduce you. We can just feed you specific information with a high likelihood that it’ll be relevant — and that you’ll bite.

But here’s what’s abandoned in the race to the bottom for those thin-sliced leads: The power of a brand. Famously, brands are what make products and services meaningful to the folk who seek relationships with them. It’s why we’re willing to sacrifice more when we choose between two almost-identical products . . . one simply holds more value in our hearts, regardless of facts and information. And it’s a value we’re happy to pay for.

Which brings us back to those ads that make people happy. See, great brand advertising tells stories. Great ads provoke us, tease us, intrigue us, cajole us, urge us to engage with them for longer. To appreciate them for their wit or their insight or their gut-punching ability to stop us in our tracks. Their power to evoke a reaction is the gift we alluded to earlier. By moving us, by stirring our hearts, they’re giving us something special. A reward. A small thank you for letting them in.

These are the kind of ads we make at An Agency.

So sure, we do all the left-brained-data-drenched-information-rich-media-facing stuff our peers do, but we wrap it inside something magical — a brand’s power to enchant our clients’ customers.
We love creativity and passion and courage. We love working hard to mine the pictures and words that communicate a feeling, and we love clients who have the pride to stand up and — as importantly — the moxie to stand out.

If you’ve got something wonderful that you believe the world needs to hear about, and if you want the right people to not just hear about it but to tell all their friends about it too, think about summoning your brand’s power to electrify and attract people. Think about hitching your wagon to a place that’s still smitten with that ol’-fashioned notion about creative ideas and the most powerful ways to express them.

Let’s chat.

Wild Eggs Restaurants

Breakfast in the south is a very serious business. So cue: Wild Eggs, a large, rapidly growing breakfast-food restaurant chain, which over the last decade has become one of the premier players in the marketplace. The interiors reflect their casual-but-fun-and-fresh take on cooking, an aesthetic we were asked to emulate in our social media work for them. Families, smiles, lots of light and color . . . and of course eggs.

Overhead shot of fully loaded breakfast table.

Services Provided

Digital media
Photography
Social media

Kykeon Coaching

Once upon a time, a successful senior executive said to himself, ‘Screw all this. I want to help troubled young adults not only find their purpose in life, but equip them with the personal, social, and even professional tools to make a go of it.’ And so he embarked on transforming this passion into a reality, retaining us to help him name, brand, and communicate his company’s value into something that has now grown into a nationally recognized coaching platform.

Services Provided

Collateral
Graphic Branding
Paid Media
Social Media
Website

Queer Kentucky

When the 2023 Kentucky legislature started making ominous noises about limiting the rights of transgendered people with SB 150 — known as the ‘Anti-Trans Bill’ — we realized it threatened to drive marginalized communities out of the Bluegrass to seek security elsewhere. Working with a small group of partners, principally Queer Kentucky, an LGBTQ+ non-profit that champions queer culture in the commonwealth, we developed the ‘Stay Here’ campaign, built on supportive messages, rather than incendiary ones.