Can your agency make it snow in Austin? What about whip an entire city into a frenzy over a new Football Club?
Meet Wexley School for Girls where the“Secrets to Great Advertising” are practiced not just preached.

Image shot for Inc Magazine by Gregg Segal.

Today we’re taking to Wexley’s Brian Marr.  He works there.  I have no idea what he actually does.

Wexley’s clients include Microsoft, the Seattle Sounders FC, WACOM, Copper Mountain and Bacon Salt. Founded in 2003 by Ian Cohen and Cal McAllister, Wexley’s goal: use non-traditional thinking to solve communication challenges in the ever-evolving new media landscape.  And a look at their work proves they’ve stuck to that vision.  Like the time they hung Sounders scarves all over Seattle to create buzz about the new team.

Or when they created National Snow Day and even made it snow in Austin to promote Copper Mountain.

Since the first day of school, Wexley has grown to 26 employees over 6+ years. They admit the first few years were tough. The guys were getting offers to do traditional work and took a few jobs that weren’t true to the agency vision just to stay afloat. As the non-traditional and media agnostic approach started catching on with clients and agencies, Wexley has been been fortunate to be at the forefront, while others talk the game and try to work out the rules.

What was the aha moment when you realized “our company needs to be doing things differently than we have been?”

We’ve never really had the aha moment as Wexley, but each of us had something in previous roles that made us think we wanted to try approaching things differently. Cal and Ian refer to the ideas they presented at their past agencies as Second Year ideas. They’d pitch them and everyone would agree it was a great solution to the customer’s business problem, but there was always a media buy that needed to be filled first so “maybe we can do those next year since this year’s media budget is already allocated.” There was good creative, just no creativity in the execution. They believed they were onto something so they decided to start Wexley and worked to define a new model for advertising.

What books are on your nightstand or great blogs on your Google reader?

You mean aside from marketinghitch.com?

The books I read at home are mostly just entertaining and borderline embarrassing. At work, we like people to focus on individual thought first and foremost. I once tried to stay on top of everything the industry reads but I’m a few thousand posts behind. I’m just reading about something called a “Tipping Point,” which I think is going to be HUGE!

Give me an example of marketing you think is brilliant and why.

I think the owners and marketing staff at the Seahawks/Sounders are brilliant. I’m biased because we work with them, but credit should be given where it’s due. The Sounders FC set out from the beginning to build something entertaining. From the choices they made with their product (including the players they hired, the choice of a scarf as the season ticket) to how they’ve rolled it out by turning the team over to the fans, everything has been methodical and highly effective. It’s a perfect example of the product becoming the marketing.

We’ve all read that the pitch / RFP process is broken.  Many agencies aren’t even interested in competing in pitches.  Do you see an alternative to this process?

RFPs are a necessity in subjective business. Someone is paying you to do a service for them that will be unique in each situation if we’re all doing our jobs right. They want to be assured that an agency understands their business and can handle the challenge.

As an agency, it’s easy to feel like you should be able to show some similar work to win the business. I was client-side for 10 years and can tell you from experience that your client really doesn’t care too much about what you did for <insert flashy brand name here>. You might get a few points that allow you to sit down with them and have a conversation, but that’s it. In our industry, you’re only as good as your last campaign. In your client’s eyes, you’re only as good as what you can do for them. They just want to know if you can hack it.

Regarding the broken process, I think agencies have brought a lot of it on themselves since the discussion inevitably boils down to cost/expense. We had a recent $10M opportunity and our first question internally was “can we afford to do this?” because we knew the competition would probably invest a ridiculous amount of money for a 1 in 12 shot of winning the business. As a client, I always saw things like staged out rooms and highly produced videos as overcompensation for the work not being there.

All of that said there are some bad situations out there. We have all seen poorly thought out RFPs, people who don’t actually have a budget asking you to pitch, the issue of idea ownership, clients requesting fully produced creative and more. Those aren’t problems with the RFP; they’re a problem with reasonable expectations at the client. We have our parameters for success set up and only pitch when it’s in our best interest.

What does the agency of the future look like?

I think things will continue to be interesting for the next few years. The networks will eventually hit stride again, but not before the overhead associated with the shift to digital forces them to rethink their media departments. They’ll need to re-organize themselves and package their services differently. In a digital, on-demand age, clients are going to be looking for things like rapid iteration and innovation across all areas. Smaller agencies can deliver on these more quickly than larger places, but will lack the breadth that the networks can provide. To overcome that, I think we’ll see independent agency co-ops on the rise.

We’ll also see far more digital focus, obviously. When you look at the numbers it’s surprising how little is sold today. These aren’t precise stats, but ~30% of eyeballs are online and it’s still only about 5% of the media mix for big brands. Why is that? My guess: it’s insanely more time consuming/expensive to do a multi-touch digital campaign than it is to do traditional. It’s only time before savvy clients are going to start demanding more digital in their mix than media departments are selling them.

What do marketers need that agencies are not giving them?

Marketers desperately need integration across their campaigns, which now involve more customer touch-points than ever. Internally, most marketers are still trying to determine the best way to align themselves organizationally to be most effective – they likely have a new social media team, an experiential team, grassroots team, digital media team and more. Between those groups and the preexisting ATL and BTL teams there is a going to be overlap. At the same time as clients staking out territory in the disciplines they care about, agencies are involved in a crazy land grab. It will settle with time, but for a while agencies will need to focus on playing nice to help make campaigns as integrated and effective as they have the potential to be.

Who do you admire and why?

I’m a huge fan or Pixar’s approach. They’re master story-tellers and have a unique process that enables consistent creativity and innovation. The result is a set of investors, employees and fans who can count on something great coming from them. I’d love to be a fly on the wall there for a day or two. I think we would learn a lot.

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Hitch is a consultancy that helps marketers hire the right ad agency.

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