This marks the fifth time in over a decade that MediaPost has selected Giant Spoon as one of our agencies of the year, but it’s the first time we are recognizing it as “Independent Agency of the Year.”
Partly, that’s because -- in our infinite wisdom -- MediaPost has retired the category it has won four times before: “Creative Agency of the Year.”
We retired it, because the editorial awards team at MediaPost believes all agencies are creative and creativity is baked into all of the categories we recognize.
But it’s also a testament to what Giant Spoon has demonstrated since launching in 2013 as a “creative media agency.”
In truth, Giant Spoon is an accidental creative shop, because when the team originally founded it -- a group of former OMD executives including Alan Cohen, John Haber, Trevor Guthrie and Marc Simons -- their goal was not to be known as a creative boutique, but a new kind of Big Ideas-based agency that fuses creative thinking with media execution.
It didn’t take long to realize that what Giant Spoon came up with was, in fact, the new creativity -- the kind that doesn’t have siloes, defies categorization and simply connects, engages and activates its clients’ brands with the consumers and influencers they want to reach.
That may be why Giant Spoon was quickly labeled by others as an “experiential” agency, because many of its best-known creative media executions have been activated in live, public experiences, most famously at Big Idea Mecca SXSW, but also in physical locations that manifested those experiences, including some of those highlighted in its 2024 portfolio that wrapped the Empire State Building with a 270-foot door and tied in other iconic New York City locations such as Grand Central Terminal, Rockefeller Center and the New York Stock Exchange (one of Giant Spoon’s clients, by the way) –- to promote the Season 2 launch of client HBO’s “House of the Dragon.”
It wasn’t the first time the agency turned the Empire State Building into a prop as part of an experimental media execution.
The team actually turned it upside down via a 2022 stunt for the Season Four launch of Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” parts of which take place in the “Upside Down.”
Whether it is transforming the skyline into the world’s biggest screen via drone-enabled executions or quickly adapting other new and emerging tech to convey brand messages in a new and innovative way, Giant Spoon is always on the lookout for new ways of rendering the Big Idea.
In fact, it utilized one -- if not the first execution of its kind -- utilizing the “Audio Overviews” instant podcast-creation tool in Google’s NotebookLM application to create an AI-enabled podcast detailing the agency’s top 10 campaigns of 2024 as part of the case they made to the editors of MediaPost.
And honestly, listening to it does a better job of conveying Giant Spoon’s creative -- make that media creativity -- chops last year than any flat, text-based overview some trade editors could ever write. Just click on it below and hear for yourself.
But there is another, arguably more important reason we selected Giant Spoon as our “Independent Agency of the Year” for 2024. It wasn’t just because we sunset the creative category altogether.
It’s because Giant Spoon probably is much more diversified -- and integrated -- than most industry observers know, because the glitz of its Big Idea experiential executions likely takes away from all of its other fundamentals like strategy, planning and buying and yes, underlying creative ideation for the overall brand, not just one-off, attention-getting stunts.
“Our business is kind of split,” co-founder Guthrie explained during a meeting with MediaPost leading up to this year’s awards. “About a third of it is experiential. About a third of it is media. And about a third of it is creative/strategy. We have some clients who come in by knocking on one of those doors. Others blend it together.”
In an age when the industry seems to be consolidating around fewer and bigger holding companies, MediaPost is recognizing Giant Spoon as the kind of flexible, integrated, independent agency of the year, offering all the doors a client might want.