• by Larissa Faw , June 3, 2020

Creative agency veteran Keith Cartwright is launching his own agency with an inaugural client roster including Procter & Gamble, Facebook, and LVMH. The eponymously named Cartwright agency is financially backed by WPP and will work in partnership with WPP’s global creative network, Grey Group.

Cartwright believes there is an unmet need right now for an agency to serve brands that want a more direct relationship with agency leadership, and seek a creative product built to stand out in today’s attention-obsessed economy.

“Advertising hasn't lost its way or become irrelevant,” he states. “In fact, our business is now more important and necessary than ever before. We take in more information in a day than our parents did in a lifetime.” 

“People aren’t sitting around waiting on your ad to come out,” he added. “This requires a different type of creativity [that] has to be bold and audacious in order for you to pay attention, inspire you to share and entice you to want more.”

The agency’s headquarters will be located in Venice, California. Cartwright has already hired 20 staffers, but will also leverage Grey’s international network of talent and resources to provide fully integrated and curated capabilities to clients around the world.

“My goal in structuring our agency this way allows us to maintain the highest level of client interaction and partnership,” he says, “while giving us the ability to pull unlimited resources and scale globally as needed.” 

He will be busy, continuing to serve as co-founder of Saturday Morning, a non-profit creative collective founded by ad executives in 2016 who came together to create ideas that bring awareness to and shift perceptions on racial bias, and injustice. Since its inception four years ago, the collective has worked with Spotify, Twitter and P&G.

Cartwright’s new agency is one to watch particularly during this post-pandemic new world order. He has a formidable track record. The former 72&Sunny executive creative director has experience building his own successful agency, having launched Union Made Creative in 2012 working with Nike, Lego, G&E and others before being acquired by BSSP in 2016, where he became an ECD.

Earlier, he served at the Martin Agency and Wieden+Kennedy, where he led the Jordan Brand, Nike Canada, and Nike New York.