This week, SHOOT examines a trio of ad shops creating breakthrough work for regional clients. FourStories, Portland, Ore., is looking to create work for a group of four core clients who will grow along with the agency. Ignited Minds, Marina del Rey, Calif., is mixing regional fare with some national work, while Cactus in Denver is looking to elevate its product to the national level.
IGNITED MINDS
With a staff of 104, Ignited Minds, Marina del Rey, Calif., has a lot of manpower under its roof. The agency was launched in 1999 when a group of 17 people from the internal creative group at video game developer and publishing house Activision went solo after a restructuring.
Senior VP/executive creative director Ron Gould, along with president and agency principal Eric Johnson, were part of the founding group. Gould explains that they built Ignited Minds based on the desire to place a client’s message in whatever medium best suited it, with the intention of having experts on hand to create the work. They have a fully developed in-house motion and sound department as well as advertising and design departments and a media department that handles planning and buying. The agency’s capabilities include package design, creating Web site banner campaigns, and handling events and tradeshows.
Relative to spotwork, the agency has created work for clients like Loyola Marymount University (LMU) and video game Tekken 5 from Namco. For example, in LMU basketball’s “Static Cling,” directed by Michael Downing of harvest, Santa Monica (SHOOT‘s “The Best Work You May Never See,” 3/11), ballplayer Dustin Brown consoles a co-ed in class when she relates a troubling event to her friend. The distressed girl has found a pair of women’s underwear on the floor of her boyfriend’s bedroom. Brown overhears the conversation and offers an explanation–since men don’t usually use dryer sheets when they do their laundry, the underwear was probably left behind in the dryer and stuck to her boyfriend’s clothes. The tagline concludes, “Be There For The LMU Basketball Team And They’ll Be There For You.”
For Tekken 5, the agency concepted seven spots, two for broadcast and five virals. They put out a casting call for the next great martial artist and used the footage from the auditions for the final work. CJ Waldman, who directs via harvest, worked to elicit humorous performances from the actors.
“We look at many of the viral pieces that we’re doing as work that’s going to have something outrageous, something compelling, something that’s interesting,” says Gould. “So the viewer can see why it’s not being broadcast, and why it isn’t living necessarily on a Web site because they feel like they are being treated to something that not everyone gets to see.” Although Ignited Minds creates viral work, he notes that the agency is not aggressively pursuing that discipline. Viral fare is just one of the tools the shop offers its clients.
CACTUS
Cactus of Denver, Colorado, is a mid-sized agency that has been in business for 15 years. Joe Conrad founded the company and brought creative director Norm Shearer on board a year and a half ago. Shearer believes part of his role is to elevate the creative to a national level.
To accomplish his goal, Shearer says he started by building a team that includes Michael Smilanic, a senior art director who joined the agency eight months ago; Brad Harrison, art director; Brian Watson, copywriter; and Jim Glynn, freelance copywriter.
Harrison and Watson were the creatives behind “No Brakes” for Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Wyoming (SHOOT’s “The Best Work You May Never See,” 5/6). In the spot, a cyclist triumphantly completes a challenging uphill ride through beautiful landscapes. But success is fleeting as the adventure takes a sudden detour. The man and bike careen into a tree as the brakes fail. No doubt, this is a good time to have health insurance. Harry Cocciolo of bicoastal Tool of North America directed the spot.
The shop’s other clients include the Colorado Influenza and Pneumococcal Coalition (CIPAC), The Children’s Hospital, and the Regional Transportation District (RTD). In “Flu Bug” for CIPAC, Sean Leman of Rehab, Denver, directs a lighthearted piece about a serious virus. A man dressed in a costume that looks like a human cell, but in the shade of a ghastly green, interrupts boys playing basketball and relentlessly taunts them. Then, Denver Nuggets player Marcus Camby confronts the flu bug and beats him in a game of one-on-one–Camby got his flu shot.
“Flu Bug” will go out as a viral spot in August or September in conjunction with public relations efforts. There are also plans to garner PSA time on broadcast television. On why going viral was an important dynamic for this campaign, Shearer explains, “To have the creative be something relevant and meaningful to somebody, we felt like just doing a splash of newspaper ads wasn’t going to be effective. [We felt] that we’d need to do something that would have some carry through, that would have some talk-ability, create like-ability around the situation, because getting flu shots can seem very clinical and we didn’t want to come across as some state-mandated PSA.”
The agency is looking to grow, but not necessarily in size. With about 14 people currently on staff and a handful of freelancers, remaining small-to-medium-sized would be fine, Shearer relates. Their mission is to be consistently recognized on a national and international level for their work. They would also like the ability to get into larger pitches and do work that gains the respect of savvy marketing executives who will realize Cactus is a good choice for a $20 million account.
FOURSTORIES
Two and a half years into its life, FourStories, Portland, Ore., is half way to realizing the dream set forth in its name. The goal is to have four agency-of-record clients that will grow and therefore allow the ad shop to grow.
“We’re pretty picky about the clients we work with and we probably have turned away business that maybe we shouldn’t have turned away from a business standpoint,” Austin Howe, partner/creative director acknowledges. “But from a creative standpoint, and just from a moral standpoint, our notion was: Let’s just work on stuff we love. Let’s just work on things we’re excited about, and then it’s easy. Then coming to work everyday is fun.
“So that was the idea,” he continues. “We wouldn’t become this huge agency by virtue of adding accounts. We would become a big, influential agency by growing the accounts that we have.”
Howe recruited partner John Drake, who is also the shop’s general manager, to join him. They are likeminded “ad geeks” who shared the same vision for what the perfect agency would look like.
The shop currently has two agency-of-record clients–Tillamook Cheese and Wordstock, the latter of which is a literary arts festival in Portland. The shop is also working on a project basis with clients like E&J Gallo Winery and the FX Network until it garners two more agency-of-record clients. Then FourStories will phase out the project work. “What we’re looking for are four clients similar to Nike in the sense that they’re ambitious, want to grow and have the growth potential–Tillamook is very much that way–and then grow with them,” says Howe.
In Tillamook’s “Escape from Beigeland,” with Christian Loubek of bicoastal Anonymous Content directing, people are featured going about ordinary tasks in a world that is shaded beige. At the end, they are encouraged to escape from the beige world and a colorful package of Tillamook’s sharp cheddar cheese appears on screen.
In “How to Write a Story,” for Wordstock, which was featured in SHOOT’s “The Best Work You May Never See Gallery” (5/6) Chel White, partner/director at hybrid animation laboratory/live action studio Bent Image Lab, Portland, cleverly illustrates the frustrations of writer’s block.
Although Howe admits that they will never get rich off of Wordstock–a pro bono account, which pays for production and other expenses–he said that the festival does have growth potential. But, the goal is for agency creatives to do work that they love and believe in, creating a balance between money and interesting projects that excite him and his team.
Beyond acquiring two more clients, the shop’s plans for growth include the possibility of having three more offices, one on the East Coast, one in Asia and one in Europe. “Our notion would be that we would have regional agencies in each one of these markets and really service these clients that are truly regional or more manageable national clients so that we would have basically four little agencies in each of these markets,” Howe relates.
Since he wants to stay involved in all of his shop’s work, as opposed to checking in on the work others are doing, the ideal size of his agency would be 30 people, 24 more than are on board today. “Having worked at big and little agencies, that seems to be the right size for the kind of energy we want,” Howe observes.