Marketing advisors to iconic brands & pioneering agencies
Marketing advisors to iconic brands & pioneering agencies
As President at Victors & Spoils, I championed the use of experiments that utilized our crowd of thousands of creative thinkers worldwide. The purpose was not short term success or failure, but to learn by trying. For example:
The philosophy behind Open Strategy was that open systems create better thinking than closed ones.
So we connected our international crowd of thousands of strategists and researchers to work on brand, business and comms strategy projects. This allowed us to access deeper insight more quickly than traditional methods.
Using this platform, we worked with American Express, WD40, Vail Resorts, Pfizer, Pernod Ricard, Crocs and many others.
A notable project was a global positioning study for Dove skin care in Japan, China, India, Brazil and the U.S. In just 6 weeks we audited digital, mobile and social behavior to develop insights into perceptions of “beauty”. native language immersions with 100 women in each market, we created 5 in-depth reports including culturally relevant, media-specific direction across key social channels .
Small-batch clothier Mountain Standard wanted consumer insights and direct collaboration that traditional research methods couldn’t deliver.
We built a pop-up retail store with a workshop where customers could engage directly with designers and the agency to create new clothing and marketing materials.
And of course, walk out with outdoor gear for their next adventure in the mountains, desert or ocean.
link: DIGIDAY
So many businesses, large and small, need creative help — design and copy, shooting and editing, web and social. And there’s never been more freelance creative talent around. We built this online marketplace to connect creative solutions with creative needs.
At V&S, our very business model was a critique of the advertising industry. For our holiday video, we decided to comment on another pervasive in the industry: the photoshopped portrayal of women in ads.
The video garnered 5 million views on Vimeo, Vimeo Staff Pick, top search result for “Happy Holidays” on Google and one of Adweek’s 30 most popular stories of 2013.
Featured on Reddit, Buzzfeed, CNN, Time Magazine Online, Gizmodo, Jezebel, USA Today, The Daily Beast, and the Huffington Post.
Ad and Strat Hacks are built on the premise that initial spontaneous decisions are often as good as – or even better than – carefully planned and considered ones.
A nimble team consisting of clients, V&Sers and relevant crowd accelerates a strategic and creative development process with the goal of attacking the client’s task within the timeframe of one day.
The team then identifies and advances several key campaigns or executions to take into production for the client.
At one point, 10% of the agency’s staff came from our internship program. This allowed us to choose the best fitting young pros, train them in our unique culture, and be as sure as possible our hires would stick. The program was notable because we ran internships year-round and put our interns in real work situations, trusting them to punch above their weight. Case in point: the Victorship name, identity, marketing and operational plan was the invention of one of the intern group’s class project.