Being an independent agency isn’t the advantage it used to be. There are simply too many choices.
And we can’t differentiate on capabilities anymore either. Most of us offer some combination of strategy, creative, media, production and now AI. And if we don’t have it all (and we’re smart), we have an explanation for how we can scale up when needed.
So what can we do to stand out?
After more than four decades of leading agencies, I have some advice for my fellow founders and agency leaders: Don’t forget to invest in your own brand.
I know it sounds obvious. But I’ve lived through what happens when you let your own brand rest on its laurels because you’re busy building everyone else’s. The result is you end up having to work a lot harder to show people what you’re capable of, because they’ve already formed a perception.
So let’s invest in our brands so they can work for us.That starts by owning your story.
Ours began in 2004, when I led a management buyout to save our agency from disappearing. Our original 40 employees who we still call the “Brave 40” believed in what we were building and decided to stay, and they even pooled their own money to buy the sign that would hang above our door.
We were a little agency from Rochester, New York determined to make the industry see that great ideas can come from anywhere. We were scrappy and smart, and a little rascally. The kind of agency you never saw coming.
That spirit is still in us, but we’ve grown up a lot over the last 22 years, too. In 2012, we sold to Project Worldwide to gain the ability to scale, because their Detroit roots matched our grit, and because their independent and employee-owned model allowed us to keep our soul. As we grew, we raised the bar across our business, from the talent we attracted, to our work, and the brands we worked with.
Along the way, our brand stopped keeping up with who we’d become, and it also lost the soul that gave us our start. We needed to reflect the agency we’d become while protecting the equity and reputation we’d built.
Now, here’s something that might surprise you: I didn’t lead our rebrand.
I’ve always believed in leading from a place of abundance, and making room for more people and ideas. That means trusting the people around you to see things you might not.
I let go, and the rest of the leadership team led the rebrand with the freedom to challenge everything, including the name on the door.
