our principles

April 15, 2009

Some things are extremely important to us. Things that we will always do and, conversely, things we’ll never do. These are our principles.

• We are unapologetically optimistic, and we seek clients and associates who share our positive spirit.
• We want to work with clients and brands that are interested in helping consumers-not just extracting money from them.
• We believe that engaging consumers means creating work that goes beyond delivering a traditional product benefit. We strive to create work that delivers utility-something that makes it truly useful to the audience.
• We live for the “wow” response. If we had our way, we would surprise clients and co-workers (in a good way) every day.
• We put people before things when making business decisions.
• We approach new client relationships in the spirit of mutuality-we believe the fit has to be right for both parties, and it can’t just be about “winning the business.” To that end, we:
  • view speculative creative as a sometimes necessary evil and as the exception-not the rule-in new business;
  • prefer to present one foundational behavior-changing platform idea in place of the usual spec work;
  • and, we ask clients to provide us with references on them as a business partner.
• We operate best as an idea collective and to that end we don’t compete internally-we save our competitive spirit for helping our clients beat their rival brands.
• We believe that an idea must be nurtured and protected in order to reach its full potential, so we politely insist on presenting our own work to any and all decision makers.
• We believe that execution matters, and that both client and agency have to be satisfied with the idea and the execution. In situations where we can’t reach mutual agreement, we will go for a third alternative.
• We don’t shy away from “hard” conversations, and we will always share the good and the bad internally and externally.
• We believe in servant leadership-we hold our leaders accountable for helping our people realize their full potential.
• We aim to make our clients’ jobs more fun. In fact, we aim to make our own jobs fun.

And we mean it.

posted by admin April 15, 2009 in about us