• by October 26, 2006

Joey Reiman, founder and CEO of BrightHouse, is a refugee from Madison Avenue who worked at traditional ad agencies for most of his career. He founded BrightHouse more than a decade ago on the premise that ideas about media, creative, strategy, and branding require deep thinking and a unique, multidisciplinary approach to problem-solving.

"We're the first company to bring the world 'ideation' into the marketing world," Reiman says. And ideas - or more specifically, the thinking that goes into them - take time, something today's agencies don't acknowledge but, says Reiman, should insist on. The title of his forthcoming book is apt: Business at the Speed of Molasses.

Reiman's Atlanta-based consultancy has devised alternative media strategies for Coke, Coty, The Home Depot, Delta Airlines, Graco, Emory University, and Pepperidge Farm, among others. Reiman boasts that BrightHouse is comprised of artists, consultants, and "luminaries," by which he means academics and scientists from all over the world. The firm's chief creative officer is a published poet. In many cases, cultural anthropologists devise media plans and neuroscientists analyze how consumers' brains work.

As part of its unconventional approach, BrightHouse strikes 16-week contracts with clients, with the first four weeks committed to honing what the team will be thinking about. "Clients are thinking, 'I'm paying you to think?'" Reiman says with a laugh.

Instead of brands, BrightHouse devises "stands," purposeful and meaningful "unifying doctrines" designed to turn consumers into advocates rather than mere loyalists. For Coke, it created digital applications for people to find their soul mates. When Delta Airlines went through bankruptcy in 2002, BrightHouse's bright idea reduced the carrier's media budget to zero and deployed its nearly 70,000 employees as a media group to spread the message about the company's new positioning.

"We often tell people to reduce their media budget significantly, because the real media are the messengers," Reiman says. "Don't shift money to PR; shift it into human resources as an investment in training." Getting employees unified around a single doctrine or mission, he says, is all-important. Much like the employees at BrightHouse, he might add.