Award-winning chief creative officer Ryan Kutscher and Amalgamated former Chief Strategy Officer Doug Cameron have opened Circus Maximus, a collective marketing services agency that is part of the recent advertising trend that capitalizes on a more nimble, open-structured model. The agency specializes in “cultural opportunism” – positioning brand problems within a larger cultural context and offering solutions that interject brands into the pop-culture discourse.
The leadership team – which also includes Craig Carey, an entrepreneur and technologist who founded DC-area casual dining concept Big Buns, and runs a technology consulting firm – will leverage its extensive network of creative free agents, specialists, non-conformist thinkers, and academics to develop campaigns intended to influence cultural discussion.
“‘Mad Men’ is a good TV show, but has done a terrible thing: It has convinced many in our industry that the golden age of creativity is behind us,” Kutscher said. “We believe the creative golden age is taking shape right now – it’s just not happening as much in traditional or big agencies. The collective model has no weighty agency infrastructure, no bureaucracy, no bloat. We have ‘noverhead.'”
Cameron explains: “We looked at what Ty Montague and Rosemarie Ryan’s co: collective and Alex Bogusky’s Common were doing, and we became convinced that the collective model was the way to market a more exciting, effective form of creativity. It offers clients every type of service that they get from a very large agency – strategy, creative, digital production, PR – and more. It taps into the valuable entrepreneurial force happening across the creative industries and delivers it to brands in ways traditional agencies simply cannot.”
Kutscher has earned acclaim working at agencies such as Crispin Porter + Bogusky(CP+B), where his “Whopper Freakout” campaign captured wild reactions from customers who discovered that Burger King’s flagship Whopper had been playfully discontinued. The pop-culture phenomenon won the Grand Effie and was praised by The Wall Street Journal for raising the company’s stock price. Kutscher is a three-time winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity – for Method, VW and Burger King’s “BK Games.” As Co-Chief Creative Officer of JWT NY, his “Magic Vision App” campaign for Band-Aid recently won the Gold Lion at Cannes.
As Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Amalgamated, Cameron put cultural strategy into action with the Svedka Girl campaign, leading the brand to become the fastest-growing vodka in the United States, outselling well-established incumbents Stolichnaya and Grey Goose. He achieved similar standout results in rebranding Working Today as The Freelancers Union, helping grow that organization’s annual revenues from $1.2 million to more than $100 million today. Other brands for which he has created culturally provocative campaigns include Ben & Jerry’s, Mike’s Hard Lemonade, Honest Tea, Fat Tire and FUSE Network. Cameron co-authored “Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands” with former Harvard Business School professor Doug Holt, whose Cultural Strategy Group will partner with Circus Maximus on select projects.
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