We always err on the side of inclusivity and diversity, which means we’ll always try to find a way to support kindred advocates when they need help with messaging. We were approached by the pastor of a Lutheran assembly and asked to rename and brand them. The congregation is characterized by its exceptionally eclectic and accepting spirit, and is established to appeal to and nourish people who can’t find a home among more conventional belief groups.
Western Reserve Academy has been consistently ranked high among the nation’s top boarding and day schools, and 100 percent of the graduates go on to attend four-year colleges or universities — many at the most selective schools in the world.It’s a hidden secret in a small town in Ohio, and it takes its communications to the outside world seriously, demanding only award-winning creative work.
It’ll come as no surprise to learn that the urban Black population is under-served when it comes to mental health treatment. This discrepancy is compounded by the stigma many Black men and youth experience as they have to grapple with mental illness’s challenges. University of Louisville and Louisville Metro coordinated with our client, NAMI, to raise awareness of this issue. We developed the MindOurMind outdoor and digital campaign by leaning into how resilient and resolved someone has to be to tackle the problem.
With 17 stores (and growing), Heine Brothers had ramped things up in 2023 with a national online subscription service. And to make things even more interesting, they’d begun to pivot away from being a small neighborhood brick-and-mortar coffee shop toward a cooler kind of brand, one that went head to head with Starbucks for a more youthful audience. By consolidating the brand with the tagline ‘Something Good Happens Today,’ we kept the personal sense of warmth and familiarity, but hitched it all to a larger, positive, optimistic, and elevated position about companionship and shared community.
Our client Rabbit Hole came to us with an outrageous-but-turned-out-it-was-true-after-all story of a woman with nine children, a distillery, and an international bootlegging operation. Mary Dowling was the first female distillery owner and operator in the US, but she had the ill fortune of coming to prominence at the very worst time, Prohibition. Her legend and the bourbon it inspired live on in this fine whiskey, a testament to the woman we subsequently and appropriately dubbed the ’Mother of Bourbon.‘
It’s been said that I have a Napoleon complex. That, being of compromised height, I’m quarrelsome, too challenging, a bit too extra. That I’m always spoiling for a dust-up.
However, and in the words of the late Dame Edna Everage, this is a phallus I want to explode.
I don’t dispute that I’m a passionate person; I think most creatives would lay claim to that, and with pride. But the reason for this isn’t my limited distance from the ground. Nor is it from being born a gadfly. Rather, it‘s driven by a spirit of righteousness.
For better or for worse, and as a professional consequence, I like being with people who want to defend the high ground. I want to work with advertising people who believe that what we do is meaningful and worth standing up for.
I particularly want to work with people who cherish imagination and endeavour, and who, as a result, understand that bending a knee to safe, predictable, thoughtless practices isn’t what any of us signed up for when we first got into the business.
We didn’t imagine a world where we’d have to stop working on a project because a timesheet said so . . . or that winning creative awards wasn’t evidence of excellence. And we most certainly didn’t imagine working in a world where processes were consciously, deliberately, and happily embraced by management as ways to suffocate any possibility of expressing ideas or developing creative messages.
Sod that.
I’m at An Agency because there are more people like me. Maybe not as righteous or as short, but like me.
They’re agency professionals who come in every day excited about the chance to create something remarkable. Built on real brand strategy and burnished by years of experience and craftsmanship. Agency professionals who go home every evening weary but proud, exhausted from doing their best, and braced by the knowledge that they’re only allowed to stop when the work is ready.
These are my people. These are the people we court as clients, as creative partners, as advocates, and as allies. This is why I work here.
Or as Napoleon said: Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
I grew up in an advertising agency. My dad ran the largest independent agency in Houston. His career ended in the Southwest Advertising Hall of Fame. We talked about advertising incessantly. My room had a wall that was covered by the DDB VW ad ‘Lemon.’ The entryway of our home had a Peter Max 7Up billboard. Advertising was dinner conversation. When dad and I would go to Pizza Hut (a client), he’d explain to me why they had PacMan games built into the table. When we’d go to Foley’s (a regional department store and client), he’d tell me to watch how people behave in the store. He’d talk to me about merchandising. He’d tell me about signage (shopper marketing before, well, it was a thing).
Dad would play tennis with several of his clients. One of them was Jack Helfman. Jack owned car dealerships. After the matches they’d talk about traffic count, deals closed, inventory issues, and financing.
Dad was a runner. On occasion we’d run Memorial Park together. He’d talk to me about the importance of honesty in client relationships. Transparency, just like in a good marriage. The importance of treating business partners as if they were your closest friends.
It was the simplest of lessons. Dad would tell me that when a client’s business was successful, his business would be successful. And vice versa. It takes two, he’d say, both focused on solving the daily challenges each business faced.
It’s been a purposeful path toward my position as CEO at An Agency — working in Los Angeles, working in a multinational, working as a client, settling into the bulk of my career at Kentucky’s largest agency, Doe-Anderson. And experience after experience brought me to the same conclusion: Ad agencies are a dime a dozen.
Today’s sales story is data and AI and digital nimbleness and of course the long-stated and long-true omni-channel pitch.
And all that is good . . . and it matters . . . and I understand that those are often the boxes clients are checking off with their agency partner.
But I think we have a better box.
And the foundation of that box is trust. Because when I go to sleep at night, I’m replaying my dad’s words: “Build your business by building their business. Think less about you and more about them. Don’t promise creativity that’s unfathomable to others. Focus on creating opportunities for your clients. Care more about them than you care about yourself.”
So that’s my space at An Agency. And that’s my promise to you. We’ll care more about you. We’ll focus on you. We’ll eat, sleep, and breathe your mission — until we’ve so internalized it, it’s almost become our own.
What are you talking about around the dinner table?
We recognize that it strains credulity exclaiming our professional love for Labor Day.
As frequently noted, advertising is neither rocket science nor a lunch bucket profession. Your vision of our team huddled over a Grande no-whip white chocolate mocha with five pumps of an extra shot, made with soy is, well, decidedly accurate.
Where Does the Twain Meet?
An Agency exists to drive commerce through evocative creativity. We are strategists. We are designers. We are writers. We are makers. We invest whole-heartedly in creating brands that challenge convention. That truthfully reflect our client’s capabilities. That make people smile.Because we understand that your brand is an expectation. A promise.
The Fruit of Our Labor.
We accept the responsibility to lift sales. To make your brand more likable. To develop ideas that fit both your brand and your culture. To create real value in terms of long-term brand equity.
What Makes Our Work Work?
Creativity that touches hearts works. Creativity that is true works. Creativity that simplifies the complex works. Creativity that is disruptive works.
The Proof Is In the Elevator.
Common Bond Hotel Group came to us with an interesting challenge. They were building a boutique hotel outside of Louisville’s Central Business District in a neighborhood called the Highlands. Like Austin and Portland, the area prides itself in staying weird. Common Bond was converting America’s last disco ball factory into an elevated, modern hospitality experience. Expressly not luxe, but absolutely a one-of-a-kind experience that is as unusual as the area in which it is located.
Allow us to introduce you to the Myriad Hotel and a taste for this campaign through this :15 launch spot and :06 pull live streaming through YouTube and other connected services. Love it. Hate it. We believe that this work will touch hearts and is aligned with brand and culture.
A Final Splash.
This weekend when you‘re enjoying that final splish-splash of summer, consider putting our team on your Fall agenda. As much as we love AOR assignments, there is no project challenge that we are afraid to take on. We promise to treat it as a labor of love (see what we did there?).
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.
In today’s digital landscape, social media has become an integral part of any successful marketing strategy. With billions of active users worldwide, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter/X offer an unparalleled opportunity to connect with your target audience. However, when it comes to social media advertising, many brands often find themselves debating between paid social media advertising and organic social media advertising, and they’re unsure which approach will help their businesses the most.
In reality, these two disciplines aren’t mutually exclusive. Rather, they work together to maximize a brand’s online presence.
It Takes Two to Tango.
Rather than pitting paid and organic social media advertising against each other, businesses should look to leverage both approaches, and to explore how they can in fact be complementary.
Here are some tactics to consider when integrating paid and organic into your marketing efforts:
Strategic Planning: Begin by defining your goals and target audience. Paid social media can help you reach new potential customers, while organic social media helps build and engage your existing audience.
Cross-Promotion: Use paid ads to amplify your best-performing organic content. By boosting top-performing organic posts, you can extend their reach and maximize their impact.
Leveraging Insights: Paid social media provides valuable data and insights that can inform your organic strategy. Analyze the performance of your paid campaigns to identify successful content, messaging, and targeting, and apply those insights to your organic efforts.
Amplifying Events and Campaigns: When running a specific campaign or hosting an event, a combination of paid and organic social media advertising can drive greater participation and engagement. Use paid ads to create awareness and reach a wider audience, and complement it with organic content to foster engagement and build excitement.
We Can’t Dance.
In the traditional sense, that is. Thankfully, we’re fond of a foxtrot and we’re quick to a quickstep in the social space.
If you’re looking to dance your way through the social scene and you’re a partner away from a duet? Let’s chat.
