• by Ann Cooper , October 28, 2005

The Little Guys: Wexley School for Girls

Seattle-based Wexley School for Girls was set up in 2003 as an alternative to larger shops, with a focus on short films and on offering clients something different. "We're a communications agency," says Ian Cohen, who started the agency with Cal McAllister, both formerly of Wieden + Kennedy and Publicis.

"We launched to try and reach our target audience better. We're the little guys. Clients call us in to shake things up, which is really flattering. We're only eight people, and we're pretty concept-based, so it's really tight and we do so many different things. We're like a small Crispin, and we try and blend it all in," Cohen explains.

Wexley started off with several short films for the likes of Yakima, Nike, ESPN, Microsoft, and Corbis, and the agency became known as something of a branded entertainment shop. Cohen says different clients want different things from branded entertainment. "Some, like Nike, just want to add to their brand image. Others want more of a sales tool," he says. "Our record chain client, for whom we held a three-day concert, needed to make sure it sold CDs, so measuring comes in different forms."

Still, Cohen points out, branded entertainment has its limitations. The more clients ask for it, the more it's in danger of becoming like wallpaper. "You do have to do it differently, as in any other medium," he says. "The fun part of it is that it is constantly changing with each new application. We work with Microsoft and we're doing some in-depth kind of messaging which is extremely open-ended. We're doing stuff I can't tell you about  agencies don't even know it exists as a tool."

Cultural Branding: Amalgamated

"We decided that the most powerful way to work was to team a cultural strategist with a creative person, as opposed to an art director with a copy writer," says Douglas Cameron, director of strategy at Amalgamated, New York. "That's how we've been working since we opened, and we're about to formalize that and say, 'This is the way we do things.' I write strategy and Jason writes creative, and you can't separate the two."

Since it opened, Amalgamated, which Cameron established two and a half years ago with fellow ex-Cliff Freemanites Jason Gaboriau and Charles Rosen, has picked up Ben & Jerry's, Svedka vodka, Belgium Brewery's Fat Tire beer, and its biggest account, Cablevision's $50 million Optimum family of products. The agency also added as a partner Douglas Holt, a former Harvard professor and author of How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding.

"To a certain extent we've been flying by the seat of our pants," says Cameron. "Clients will come to us and say, 'Look, you are one of these hot new agencies we read about, and we don't really understand what you do, but let's try it anyway.' Others have read Doug Holt's book or articles."

The agency is structured around the idea of "cultural branding," which it sees as the future of marketing. "We're integrating the consumer and the strategic cultural brand with our creative thinking,' Cameron says. "Our big next thing is to integrate it with media thinking. Clients are now willing to start thinking out of the box for media solutions, so we think the real answer will be in the marriage of cultural branding and media planning, as opposed to creativity and media planning."

Creative Collective: The Brooklyn Brothers

"How we'd like to think of ourselves in the future is as a business that understands that creativity has a dramatic effect on the bottom line," says Guy Barnett, founder and creative director of The Brooklyn Brothers, which is neither based in Brooklyn nor comprised of brothers. "And we'd like to take an equity stake in as many companies as we can, so that our business always becomes broader than just providing somebody with marketing advice or advertising."

Barnett and his partner Callum MacGregor, both formerly of Ogilvy & Mather and J. Walter Thompson, founded the agency three years ago as a creative collective that would partner with other agencies and provide the kind of nimble, fleet-footed creative work they saw lacking at bigger agencies. But since then the agency has grown and evolved by adding new partners such as brand planners Paul Parton and Matt Lake, and by taking an equity stake and share of the revenue in Premcal, a product to treat premenstrual syndrome (PMS).

"Matt and Paul joined to make what we offer a little bit more mature," Barnett says. "Both came from DDB agencies, so they're used to working on big brands. So are we. We'd been operating as a two-man creative operation. It was time to grow up and offer a more rounded service to the clients."

For Premcal, the agency is doing everything from package design and advising on the size of tablets to TV and a Web site launch. "Solving PMS is now part of our business, and it's not just about creating ads," Barnett says. "It makes you that much closer to what you are doing, and obviously the rewards are based on revenue and increasing share price."

Whimsical Dutch Treat: StrawberryFrog

StrawberryFrog is perhaps the best known and most colorful of the new shops that have hung a shingle in New York in the last few years. As an offshoot of its Amsterdam mothership, StrawberryFrog's New York office has landed such high-profile advertisers as Old Navy, Mitsubishi, Ikea, Pfizer, Diet Coke, and Sara Lee. The agency recently won a $150 million global creative assignment for Heineken and, at press time, was a finalist for BMW's Mini account.

StrawberryFrog's fall campaign for Old Navy is a whimsical romp in apparel-land. One TV ad shows young women in a farm field harvesting corduroy pants instead of crops. Another spot features a waitress carrying trays of casual tops and pants rather than plates of burgers and fries.

What makes the agency successful? According to Kevin McKeon, who recently joined SF from Bartle Bogle Hegarty as partner and executive creative director, "StrawberryFrog has a real global, wide open point of view in creativity. There's a lot more visual and unconventional thinking that goes on here than at other agencies. We're looking for designers -- not advertising but editorial designers. This gets back to how media advertising needs to look: less like advertising and more like editorial content and culturally participatory stuff," McKeon says.

The agency beat out McCann Erickson, an agency giant, to win the Heineken account, which will be handled by both the Amsterdam and New York offices. "I'm doing a panel at the Art Director's club on 'The Mystique of the Boutique,' and I can't wait to tell them there's no such thing as a boutique anymore," McKeon says. "Clients are looking for agencies to be more cost-efficient, faster, and more diverse, and the bigger agencies have a harder time doing that. And there are a lot of clients out there thinking they can do better."

McKeon continues: "The old metaphor of old agencies turning around a battleship is still so true. We succeed because we have very little internal structure, which makes us very fast. We don't have to go through four levels of creative management."

So how big can StrawberryFrog afford to get before it gets too big? "I don't know. We don't think about it that way. It's about the model and the way we work, but obviously we want to grow," McKeon adds.

One of the keys to the agency's success is its ability to promote ideas across media including the Web, print, TV, outdoor, and other forms, as well as globally. Its smallish size didn't matter to global client Heineken; StrawberryFrog has just 100 people -- 25 in New York and 75 in Amsterdam.

Living Up to Its Name: Anomaly

In its 18 or so short months of existence, New York's Anomaly is certainly living up to its name. Highlights of the agency's work include a campaign for Coke's Dasani; a joint marketing initiative with the Michigan State Lottery, with whom it will share the proceeds; and the creation of a product called Mobile-U, a collection of licensed college sports ringtones and wallpapers to which it owns the rights. As Media went to press, Anomaly was a finalist for the $70 million BMW account.

Not bad for an agency whose founders are still settling into their new digs on lower Broadway. "It's gone much better than we expected since we set up," says founder Carl Johnson, the former chief operating officer at the New York office of TBWA/Chiat/Day. "We're incredibly happy with how clients have embraced that difference. It was one of the questions we had when we opened: Were clients ready for someone like us?"

Apparently they were. "The timing was excellent," Johnson says. "There was a groundswell of need out there. Clients wanted someone offering something very different."

Exactly how different? For starters, Johnson says the agency's founders -- Justin Barocas, Ernest Lupinacci, Andrew Kibble, Jason Deland, Sal LaGreca, Johnny Vulkan, and Mark Kaplan -- offer a diverse skill set, including Web creative, design, media, licensing, and technology services.

Also different is the company's business model. "We don't want to own services, but intellectual property," Johnson says. Anomaly is also vehemently opposed to selling time. "We charge based on the value of ideas. We have two different price strategies: value pricing for us and for the client, and payment based on results. We're not in the advertising business; we manage consumer brands and some form of content."

Creating Exception: Taxi

Taxi, the Toronto-based ad agency known for, among other things, its design chutzpah and for introducing the BMW Mini north of the border, motored into the Big Apple in December of 2004 in search of a wider highway on which to gun its creative engine. According to Paul Lavoie, Taxi's founder and chief creative officer, "In Canada we were gathering a lot of U.S. brands such as Nike, Mini, and Viagra, and our work was seen around the world," he says. "But we had already pitched all the best business in Canada."

Opening up shop on an 18th floor aerie overlooking Fifth Avenue, the agency's name reflects its philosophy: that a taxi should hold only a few people. "It's a way of re-emphasizing the structure of the agency," says Lavoie. "With three or four key people, you're empowered."

Taxi, whose motto is "doubting convention, creating exception," is one of several new agencies setting up shop in New York. Lavoie's partner, Jane Hope, likens the current era to the time when such artists as Picasso exploded onto the art scene. "It's an exciting time in the history of the ad industry," she says. "These new agencies act like a firestorm. They're here to stay and build brands."

Clients seem to agree. Taxi, named Agency of the Year in Canada four years in a row, recently landed the $60 million Amp'd mobile phone launch, and has projects from Nike, CSTV Networks, and others in the pipeline.

Lavoie says the agency works on brands it can find value in, and only goes after brands that occupy the No. 2 through No. 5 spots in any category. "We call them 'The Hunters,' " Hope says. "We're advertisers with a conscience. We're not afraid to use the word no." "Doubt is part of our mantra -- it's all about challenging conventions," Lavioe says. "It opens up the conversation intellectually."