Marketing advisors to iconic brands & pioneering agencies
Marketing advisors to iconic brands & pioneering agencies
With founders at each other’s throats, competing visions and dwindling financial reserves, Victors & Spoils was at the point of breaking.
My job was to make a business out of a roughly defined but disruptive idea — that an open approach to creativity could not only work but thrive.
Starting with 9 miscast or underutilized employees, over the next four years we grew to a nimble machine of 65, multiplied revenue by a factor of 10, became profitable and made award-winning ads, all while continuing to innovate.
As President with P&L and budget responsibility, I managed every aspect of the agency. My approach was to evolve the narrow idea of crowdsourcing to an “open” agency where ideas of all kinds could truly come from anywhere. To do that, I had to change the way the agency was structured.
We built a dedicated creative department and hired senior account people which allowed us to control execution of open-sourced ideas.
And we outsourced production, planning, research and strategy, which allowed us to find specialists for each project. .
Along the way, I championed experiments that used the crowd, our differentiating feature. The purpose was not near-term wins (although we did have those) but to learn how to do things differently. For example:
- a marketplace to connect small clients with creative freelancers
- short ideation sprints (one day or one week) for clients who needed strategy/creative ideas very fast
- an app that allowed fans of Harley-Davidson and Converse to submit their own advertising ideas
- converted our store-front office into a pop-up store where customers could interact with designers of Mountain Standard (purveyors of outdoor gear) on garment and marketing ideas
- “Open Strategy” connected our crowd of strategists and researchers to work on brand, business and comms strategy projects, notably a global positioning study for Dove in Japan, China, India, Brazil and the U.S.
Along the way we worked with lots of big clients in every category:
Coke and Pepsi
General Mills and Unilever
Harley-Davidson and SMART
Diageo and Pernod-Ricard
Merck and Pfizer
Converse and Adidas
Groupon and JCPenney
Our work made The New York Times Magazine cover. We met Michelle Obama. Won the Super Bowl for JCPenney.
And because we trusted people to punch above their weight, we were named Best Places to Work in AdAge.
We never spent much money on amenities and instead focused on talent. But we cared for our space like a craftperson’s comfortable workshop.
Our main conference room, with barn doors that opened up the large space on two sides. I managed the architectural process and a key goals were openness and collaborative spaces.
No one had an office. Which made co-working areas very important. The “backyard” with its garage door was open to a patio and filled with cornhole games much of the year.