Hasta La Creative!

“That wasn’t something we initially sought when we met with MullenLowe. It was the blessing of what we found in working with this agency,” says Kara Wallace, VP of North American marketing for Royal Caribbean International. “In this market, where you need agility and speed to market and you have to act fast, we’re working in a collaborative fashion,” she says. “Those things are coming together before it ever gets to us, and working out the issues and opportunities so we can really move much faster.”

MullenLowe Mediahub went up against the big dogs of the media world and reports an 80 percent win rate, increasing revenue by more than $20 million and scooping up clients MTV, Ulta Beauty and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts.

Mediahub did eye-catching media work for clients like Netflixwinning a Cannes Lion for its “Narcos” work, which included putting archival footage of Pablo Escobar’s prison escape on CNN’s home-page, giving a facsimile of his favorite sweater as a gift to influencers, and customized TSA bins. Mediahub used its R&D Lab (which stands for “radical and disruptive”), a small team of the agency’s “right-brain media thinkers” that it has removed from day-to-day business, to come up with breakthrough ideas for its most avant-garde clients, such as the campaign it did for the Netflix series “Black Mirror.” The agency hard-coded creepy messages into websites to reach its target audiencead blockers: “Hello ad blocker. You cannot see the ad. But the ad can see you.” The agency says search traffic for the series quintupled as a result of the campaign compared with the previous season.

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“We’re finding more and more of our thinking and ideas have social at their heart, and that provides a focus for our thinking and approach,” says John Hadfield, BBH Singapore CEO.

With a staff of 120 (who hail from more than 20 countries), the office has averaged double-digit year-on-year growth for the past four years, with 11 percent revenue growth in 2017. Business wins last year included Uber Singapore, plus the regional social and content remit for Uber, as well as Red Bull’s Asia content studio and global social newsroom. It also was named lead agency for Singtel, Singapore’s biggest pitch of 2017.

The agency, which raised its profile at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity in 2017 with 15 Lions for Nike’s “Unlimited Stadium,” followed up that work with connected basketball courts in the Philippines where players could access Nike training drills on their phones without using smartphone data, in partnership with Google. The surfaces underfoot were also giant works of art, with portraits of NBA stars by artist Arturo Torres.

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Sedef Onar, chief talent officer and partner, says local work “energizes our people” and makes them proud. Another point of pride is the fact that 72andSunny was one of only two shops last year certified by the 3% Movement as creating inclusive cultures in which both men and women can thrive. Of the shop’s 700-plus staffers, 55 percent are women, and 29 percent of creative executives are women.

For 2018, 72andSunny plans to prioritize its creativity and emphasize the right resources to help clients achieve their goals rather than focus on one particular discipline or capability. “It’s about ideas, not assets,” says Evin Shutt, chief operating officer and partner.

The agency isn’t blind to ad industry challenges such as procurement, causing some marketers to drive down fees, but says it looks at those issues as opportunities to prove itself creatively and get some skin in the game with performance-based bonus models.

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The agency still excels at craft, as shown in Samsung’s “Billion Color Film,” a gorgeous spot for QLED color TVs depicting what it says is a miraculous 1 billion colors. To do this, the agency actually built an algorithm that could count every color in the film. Immediately following launch, awareness of the Samsung QLED was 23 percent higher than for competing brands, the agency says.

People of color now represent close to one-third of its U.S. workforce and hold 25 percent of its leadership roles. The agency is also sourcing in-house talent with R/GA OS, an internal online platform that allows the agency’s 19 offices to share different capabilities, including skills, languages, sector expertise and even currency differentiation. “It enables someone from Sydney, for example, to get to know everyone in every office,” says Greenberg.

For 2018, Wacksman predicts there will be new opportunities for the agency in tech, including artificial intelligence, virtual reality, e-commerce and more. Its diverse offerings ensure inclusion in more pitches than ever before, he adds. “Our pipeline,” he says, “has never been wider.”

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Popular playlist RapCaviar became a cultural phenomenon in 2017, kickstarting careers and helping to shape modern-day hip-hop. It was “identified as a company priority to build out as a sub-brand, as something that could meaningfully connect with artists as well as our core hip-hop audience,” Jantos says. So the team collaborated closely with RapCaviar’s creator, Global Head of Hip-Hop Tuma Basa, and first created the brand identity with Spotify’s in-house designers.

“Once we had that,” says Bodman, “we started briefing on how we would map out activities that don’t feel too much like marketing. How do we do things that feel more like a tribute to the culture in different ways?”

The work that followedwhich also included the RapCaviar MoneyPhone, a stack of cash carved out to fit a phone, a play off the money-phone memewas the kind you’d expect to find in the portfolios of the most innovative creative shops.

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When the United States Postal Service tasked MRM/McCann with getting political campaigns to spend more on postage, the agency set to work making direct mail great again.

The USPS earned a significant chunk of political spending in 2012, but it saw that political spend was set to increase significantlyand it wanted to keep up.

To lure more dollars to mail, MRM launched “Direct Mail Is the Perfect Platform for Your Platform” for the 2016 elections, 2018 midterms and races in between. The agency gave campaign managers “real-time” insights with a Marketing Impact Calculator application that helped them adjust their current spending and media mix, see shifts in message lift and determine which pieces were getting the best returns. MRM also gave mail a little glamour with augmented reality and sound chips that made it shareable.

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Assembly co-founder and CEO Martin Cass likes to tell the story about the agency’s humble beginnings just four years ago. Cass, Michael Nicholas (now chief entrepreneur in residence for MDC Media Partners) and Michael Day (now MDC Media’s chief financial officer) crashed at a sister MDC agency, working at tables bought hastily at Walmart and, ahem, borrowing Wi-Fi from the coffee shop downstairs. And this was after some initial tumult, as the agency began as a mishmash: Parent MDC Partners merged RJ Palmer and TargetCast to form Assembly in 2014, and also rolled two other MDC media companies, Doner Media and Integrated Media Solutions, into the group.

“You want chaos? You try to do four mergers in a year,” says Cass.

But living up to its name, the agency has fit the pieces together. In 2017, Assembly says, it saw a 12 percent year-over-year increase in revenue and scored more than 10 new clients, including Transamerica and Belkin, as well as the consolidated Boehringer Ingelheim account, all totaling $500 million in new billings.

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After working on Corona from a multicultural perspective, The Community won total market duties for the launch last year of Corona in cans for the Constellation Brands-owned beer. The agency, which has 250 staffers, also grew its portfolio to include general market work for General Mills’ Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Hornitos tequila, alongside new tech company Magic Leap.

This year has already seen a successful push for Verizon, “Best for a Reason,” which features actual engineers at the brand telling their stories. In three weeks, the campaign garnered 6.5 million views.

“Telling all these micro-stories from a local-up approachit’s a pretty powerful message to see what Verizon is doing behind the scenes,” says Montero, noting that The Community’s Verizon work is now evenly divided between multicultural and general market.

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A simple mantra propelled Somesuch to the top of our Production Company A-List this year: “We give a fuck.”

Industry vet Sally Campbell says that has fueled the company since she started it in 2007 in London with her husband, director and Atlantic Records alum Tim Nash, and fellow helmer Nick Gordon. Somesuch gives a fuck about ideas. It gives a fuck about craft. And in an industry notoriously known for giving male talent the choice opportunities, it continues to give a huge fuck that all its directors get a fair shot at doing a standout piece of work.

Somesuch created ads that helped propel the conversation about equality and social justice forward in powerful and artful ways with a roster containing, for the industry, an unusually high number of women (10 of its 27 directors).

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Ad Age has been honoring the best agencies of the year since 1974, and every year there’s a lively and heated internal debate over which shops should make the list and in what order they should be ranked.

Usually it’s a fun undertaking.

Judging this year’s list took on a new and unwelcome tenor as allegations of inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment were raised about key players in the advertising industry. It made us think and rethink this batch of A-Listers, an honor typically based on financial performance, new business acquisition, future-thinking strategy, excellent creative work and, to a lesser extent, agency culture.

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