Celebrating Our 20th Year

20 Years: Three Game-Changing Clients

You don’t survive 20 years as a creative agency without some game-changing client partnerships along the way. We love to help our clients reach their goals, but often, they shape our business just as much as we shape theirs. So let’s take a look at three clients who have each had a substantial impact on our company.

Universal Pictures

Early in our history, before we had even formally named our agency, we did our first project for Universal Pictures: Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift. We developed the website, banners, and digital activations for the film, including an Xtreme Desktop that users installed on their computers. We used it to deliver content and poll them for their thoughts about the franchise. Tokyo Drift was the first of many innovative campaigns — for more than 100 titles — that we executed for Universal Pictures over the coming decades. This was at a time when studios generally had a digital marketing department made up of four or five people at most — now there are that many VPs in the department. Rather than pitching on every campaign, we aligned interests at the start of the year. They awarded projects based on that planning, and we collaborated with the client on our proposals as we locked in the ideas. Many of these projects ended up being epic.

The partnership, led by JP Richards, the future President of Marketing at Warner Bros. and Lionsgate, with constant support from Doug Neil, EVP of Global Digital Marketing and Media at the time, boosted our growth in the early years. Their confidence in us was contagious, empowering us to add incredible talent to the team and pushing us through the 2008-’09 economic collapse when many other companies were forced to shutter their doors. It was a real game-changer to know we could count on their partnership. It was such a strong relationship, it felt like family. Dominic Toretto would have been proud.

Title Highlights:

The Fast and Furious Franchise, Ted, The Green Book, Pitch Perfect, Jurassic Park and Jurassic World franchises, Despicable Me and Minions movies, The Secret Life of Pets, 1917, Mamma Mia, Les Misérables

Key Projects:

  • My Wild Night With Ted app
  • PetMoji app
  • Pitch Perfect YouTube music video
  • Furious 7 Dubsmash Challenge

Key Partners:

JP Richards, Doug Neil, Dylan Bridges, Cameron Curtis, Kris Lichthart, Nick Zalucki, Leigh Godfrey, Rob Mankin

Sony Pictures Television

The next big game changer for us was our partnership with Sony Pictures Television, specifically Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! The initial engagement started as a request for a new website for Wheel of Fortune. And while they needed one, they needed so much more than that. We presented a strategy engagement to reimagine their entire digital ecosystem. We eventually competed for, and won, an RFP to be the digital AOR for both shows. That relationship lasted seven years and was the first significant annual contract we signed. Over the course of those seven years, we rebuilt both websites, created digital content strategies, launched the Jeopardy! Online Test, managed their CRM, travelled the world to cover remote tapings, and elevated their social media. We took them into the digital present and set them up for streaming success by increasing their online relevance and engaging new, younger audiences.

We were so tightly connected to our partners at the shows that Jeopardy! actually created a category named after us: TV-G. Contestants had to name television shows that started with the letter G. Watch the clip here.

Wheel and Jeopardy weren’t the only shows we’ve worked on with Sony. In 2018, we pitched for, and won, the Seinfeld 30th Anniversary social media project. We took a 30-year-old show and refreshed it in a way that ignited old fans and enticed new ones, bringing Seinfeld back into everyday conversation. Our campaign won two Shorty Awards, including a fan-voted Best in Show, and Sony went on to sign a half-billion-dollar streaming agreement for Seinfeld with Netflix, which they recently renewed. We continue to handle the Seinfeld account as well as two other beloved sitcoms, The King of Queens and The Nanny.

Key Projects:

Key Partners:

Chris Van Amburg, Harry Friedman, Rocky Schmidt, Annette Dimatos, Grant Loud, Annie Crowe, Darcy Hornbeek, Andrea Murphy, Christine Galloway, Gabby Cohen, Tina Tung-Barisic, Jill Allemand, Dawn Schultz, David O’Neil

HBO (Now / Max)

HBO is the third client who changed the game for us. We’ll say HBO because that’s where it all started. Our first campaign with them was way back in 2007 for Generation Kill. We built them a really cool Flash website. (Yes, it was Flash, and it was very cool.) But then Showtime became a big client for a few years (runner up for this short list), and they didn’t love the idea of us working with HBO, so we had to make a choice. Showtime committed to more campaigns, so Showtime it was. But eventually they relented, and HBO came back in a big way. We handled campaigns across several amazing series, including True Detective, Boardwalk Empire, The Newsroom, The Righteous Gemstones, Insecure, Silicon Valley, Vice Principals, Succession, and Barry.

Additionally, we worked on HBO’s sister network Cinemax’s original series Banshee, The Knick, Outcast and Warrior, as well as many HBO Documentaries.

But the real game changer was when our clients brought us in to support the launch of HBO NOW, which evolved into an annual, always-on engagement to grow the subscriber base for the new OTT streaming platform. It eventually relaunched as HBO Max (then Max, then back to HBO Max), and we partnered with them through it all, up and down the funnel from brand awareness through to conversion, delivering growth creative while also working with the Partner Marketing side of the business — all with the goal of growing the subscriber base. Take a look at the video case study here.

Key Projects and Products:

  • True Detective
  • Veep
  • House of the Dragon
  • Zack Snyder’s Justice League
  • The Righteous Gemstones
  • Barry
  • Succession
  • Perry Mason
  • Insecure
  • Silicon Valley
  • HBO NOW
  • HBO Max

Key Partners:

Marissa Grasso, Jason Mulderig, Carina Foster, Sabrina Caluori, Dana Flax, Emily Giannusa, Emily Carr, Ilana Dell, Jim Marsh

From our very first days as an agency until today, our clients’ faith in us has enabled us to spread our wings and fly, putting our full potential to work for them. As our work has helped our clients look good and prosper and grow, their trust in us has allowed us to keep blooming and expanding. It’s a positive feedback loop, a true symbiotic relationship. We’ve come a long way in our 20 years as an agency, and we couldn’t have done it without these very significant partners.

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