Month: August 2019

 That’s not to say that brands don’t test before going to market with controversial ads. The current state of marketing demands focus groups, A/B testing and insights from first-party data, but is that enough?

 Before taking a stance, brands need to be able to better predict consumer backlash and prepare for narrative hijacking and digital threats. Social media intelligence allows companies to identify brand-building opportunities while reacting and building resilience ahead of reputational threats.

 Social media intelligence is built on an elevated understanding of the conversations unfolding across the vast social media landscape, and we mean the entire landscape — not just Facebook and Twitter.

 There are hundreds of forums and hubs housing billions of conversations every minute, many of which are not on a brand’s radar. From Reddit and Discord to 4chan and Gab, there is no shortage of fringe and mainstream social networks in which a brand’s shortcomings (or successes) are discussed.

 While these forums and platforms could bring about a crisis for your brand, understanding them could help you identify trends before they become mainstream, enabling advertisers to better plan their marketing and communication strategies, and to resonate with customers in a way that’s current with consumer attitudes around the world.

 Last holiday season, eBay leveraged social media intelligence to bring the brand into the heart of the conversation around Christmas. Unbeknownst to a standard social listening tool are all the latent trends emerging every year around the act of gifting. Word clouds and keyword monitoring won’t get you insights that inform creative. For example, Storyful’s human approach to social media analysis, which spans digging through conversations from Reddit to Twitter, revealed the rise of DIY gifts, especially custom advent calendars.

 Armed with this insight, eBay was able to reach its target audience within the holiday shopping demographic with bespoke, relevant ad copy. This level of relevance to consumers inspired people to share and engage with the campaign, allowing eBay to be naturally embedded into the festive narrative. 

 While Facebook and YouTube play a major role in shaping our collective reality, businesses would be remiss to ignore the trends, attitudes and even rumors emerging from the deeper layers of the social media sphere.

 A look inside the conversations people engage in provides insight into the behaviors, attitudes and feelings that influence culture, politics and world economies, for better or for worse. Social media intelligence expertise can go a long way in predicting outcomes. 

The post How brands predict business outcomes through social signals appeared first on Digiday.

That model is one that many agencies employ, regardless of whether they are handling creative, strategy, social, experiential, branding, customer experience, digital transformation, media, search, SEO or performance marketing. Roughly 60% of agencies surveyed by the 4A’s use that kind of labor-based fee model, according to a study conducted in 2014. That same study found that 16% of agencies used a mix between a commission model (where an agency is paid a commission off of the media it buys for a client) and other fee-based structures, said Matt Kasindorf, svp of agency management services for the 4A’s. 

“The fee model has not really changed, and that’s the problem agencies face today,” said Jay Pattisall, a principal analyst at Forrester. “When you talk about the squeeze and the margin, what the client and the procurement organizations are doing is that they are pulling back on the fee such that what they are paying the agencies barely covers the cost of the agency employee.” 

Why it squeezes agencies
Agencies using a fee-based structure with clients will often receive a retainer from clients for a specific set of services on a monthly basis. As clients have looked to cut costs in recent years, they have tried to rein in agency fees, push out payment to longer and longer windows (beyond 90- or 120-day payment windows) or switch to working with agencies on a project basis. This shift means that agencies, already dealing with thinner profit margins, can no longer expect a consistent revenue on a monthly basis. 

“Due to years of overcharging, or the perception of overcharging, many brands have grown wary of retainer-based engagements with agencies and prefer to ‘shop around’ when it comes to selecting their creative partners,” wrote Rebecca Rosoff, co-founder of The Kimba Group, in an e-mail. “Project-based engagements make staffing a challenge. Retaining top talent was already a challenge for most agencies, but now, agencies have to provide services for a cross-section of disciplines since the media landscape is so fractured.” 

“What the agencies are then faced with is inconsistency in revenue, very tight margins and long waiting periods before they are being paid,” said Pattisall. “They’re in a situation where they have to bankroll themselves and make the payday for several months before their bills are paid from their clients. Those compounding factors have created the economic issues that agencies are contending with.” 

Generally, these issues are more complicated for legacy agencies that are working to adapt to a new model. “The newer agencies, having been created in the last decade or so, their business models are newer and more accustomed and attuned to project-basis arrangements,” said Pattisall. “They have grown up and grown able to adapt and work with a project-fee situation. They also tend to play in capabilities and categories that are more highly desirable and paid for, digital specialties, programmatic, search, performance, digital experience development. These are execution-style capabilities that clients are willing to pay for.” 

The switch to project work versus a long-term relationship with a retainer fee-based structure will also change the way an agency works on a piece of business. “In the retainer world, you had people who were assigned to a particular piece of business 100% of the time, and they just continued to work and to rethink things until the end,” said Kasindorf. “In a project world, you’re paid for a certain deliverable. You have to figure out how to get that deliverable done in an efficient and effective way. Or you’re paid for a number of hours and if you aren’t keeping track of your hours, you will burn through your margin and potentially lose money on a project. It takes a lot more scrutiny to make sure you’re running that well.”

How we got here
Prior to the fee-based structure — which became much more popular following the creation of Omnicom in 1986 — agencies would generally take a 15% commission of a client’s media buy, and that would cover agency costs. 

“If you sold an ad for $100, you would get the $100 from the client, and you would pay the media $85, and you would take that 15%,” said Kasindorf. “Correspondingly, there was a mark-up on production that would be equated to a 15% commission. The mark-up on production was 17.65%.” 

Of course, at this time, agencies had creative and media capabilities under one roof. “That commission fee tended to be robust enough that it paid for a number of services to be applied to that,” said Pattisall. “In essence, creative and strategy were being thrown in for free because the real money maker was the media placement.” 

As media and creative were split, the agency business model transformed from a commission-based model to a fee-based model.

“Agencies used to be part of one piece of [marketing,] but as the CMO role either goes away or transforms into CRO, CPO, CIO, agencies are learning how to speak different languages with these marketers as they learn to speak different languages,” said Kasindorf.

The post ‘The fee model has not changed’: Why agencies’ biggest problem is their business model appeared first on Digiday.

Hello first-price auctions
One of the biggest changes to auction dynamics this year was Google’s move into the first-price auction arena. Many ad tech executives believe the full extent of what this industrywide shift (cemented by Google’s move) from second-price to first-price auctions is yet to be seen.

Last November, 78% of 87 publishers told Digiday they had seen an increase in programmatic revenues, which they attributed to the shift to first-price auctions. Given media buyers in a first-price auction must be prepared to pay what they bid in order to win an impression, (in contrast to second-price where they could make outlandish bids to secure a win, but only have to pay a penny over the second price bid), there was a window of transition required in which they had to smarten up their bidding strategies. So for a bit, publishers benefited from higher yields.

 

Whether that uplift continues is another matter. Supposedly to help buyers make the transition, demand-side platforms rustled up bid shading — a technique that creates a midway price point for buyers between first and second price. However, that has started to accumulate a bad rep among advertisers that have grown wary of it. Many in ad tech predict it has a short shelf life. Publishers are still peeved at the unified pricing changes Google introduced alongside its switch to first-price auctions — another factor which could see this initial ad yield bump deplete.

Behavioral targeting getting overshadowed
Forms of ad targeting are changing, spurred by the need to rely less on the third-party cookie as well as tick the regulatory box and not misuse user personal data within bid requests on open auctions. The Information Commissioner’s Office has made it pretty clear where it stands on businesses that continue to flout that condition of the General Data Protection Regulation, as they have so far. Doubt has been cast over just how much behavioral targeting which relies a lot on personal user data, has benefited anyone — specifically publishers. In June, 23% of 40 publishers polled by Digiday said their ad revenue had actually declined as a result of using behavioral ad targeting, while 45% said it hadn’t made any difference to revenues.

The new black: Contextual targeting and programmatic-guaranteed deals
More media buyers are pushing for next-gen precision-based contextual targeting products that can offer more granular than traditional contextual targeting has so far. Publishers like the Washington Post are looking to push fast into those areas and capitalize on the increased demand. In February, 28% of 103 publishers polled by Digiday said that they had seen an increase in contextual targeting revenue since 2018. That’s expected to continue rising as more products come to market. Meanwhile, contextual ad tech businesses, like Sizmek’s former Peer39, are getting snapped up. Peer39 sold to a group of ad industry vets for $18 million last week.

Publishers have for some months now, reported major lifts in programmatic-guaranteed deals. In February, 44% of 103 publishers said they had seen an increase in revenue from PG deals in 2018, according to Digiday research. Vice Media generated a 156% lift in revenue from this form of a deal last year, but most publishers have recorded a similar windfall. While open-exchange buying will remain important, some publishers are hoping to push buyers more toward private deals. The Guardian and The Times of London are among those to switch off or reduce the ability to buy ads on their sites via the open auction, in order to grow programmatic-guaranteed and private marketplace buying, which can provide a brand-safe security blanket to advertisers.

Spotlight on ad tech clean-up 
The digital ad industry’s long-serving parasite — ad fraud — continues to eat away at marketing revenues. Fraudsters are specifically targeting burgeoning areas like ads served into over-the-top environments, including connected TV sets, and mobile apps. While progress has been made with tools such as the IAB Tech Lab’s Ads.txt and app-ads.txt tools, some ad tech vendor sources predict that it will be the more recent tools: Sellers.json and supply chain object, that will cause the biggest changes this year to ad tech vendors. Ad targeting will become less bloated with unnecessary middlemen as a result, according to ad tech vendor sources. But a tool that can stunt the progress of OTT fraud techniques like server-side ad insertion, would also be very welcome. Anti-ad fraud firm Pixalate estimates that $375 million of marketing budgets is at risk in 2019 and $500 million in 2020 as a result of OTT fraud growth.

 

The post Digiday Research: How digital ad-targeting methods are changing in 4 charts appeared first on Digiday.

Earlier this year, Dow Jones rebranded its studio to emphasize its data-powered services. Inc. Media offers clients access to its proprietary technology platform that allows them to view performance metrics. The Business Journals serves a rapidly growing clientele of both enterprises and small business B2B advertisers by operating a studio with the power to serve its many local properties.

Publishers say branded content performs well on their properties because B2B audiences are more likely to find it useful. Seventy-eight percent of Business Journals subscribers would like to see more branded content on the platform, per the publisher’s most-recent subscriber survey. “Peer to peer marketing is so effective to this audience,” said Richard Russey, vp and publisher of Inc. Media.

The Business Journals Content Studio produces native advertising for a roster made up almost entirely of B2B clients. Since it launched its studio in 2016, The Business Journals has experienced 213% revenue growth. (It declined to disclose revenue.) Its standard content packages range from $5 thousand to $70 thousand, and it projects to publish 1800 pieces of branded content this year, a 29 percent increase in two years. The studio’s executive director, Tom Needham, said branded content is now the publisher’s fastest-growing digital sales channel. It works with clients like Deloitte, KPMG, Bank of America, MassMutual, and Kaiser Permanente, with 256 new native clients in 2019 to-date. The studio employs a staff of five employees, but it outsources work to a “large army of freelance editors and writers,” Needham said.

Since investing in its own branded content operation, Inc. Studio, Inc. Media has seen investments in custom content grow rapidly. Many Inc. Media clients have shifted their advertising investments from display media to custom content. “Five years ago custom content was probably 10 percent of our business. Now it’s closer to 40 percent,” Russey said, while declining to share more specific revenue numbers.

Business publishers like The Business Journals attribute some of their success to a business model that spans its 43 properties in the United States. The scale of its business has allowed the publisher to acquire a large number of small business B2B client work, while still drawing interest from national clients. “One day we might be working with a 10-person small business,” Needham said, “and the next day we might be working with the largest telecom provider in the country.” The Business Journals manages this model through a centralized studio at the publisher’s headquarters, which oversees all content production.

Some business publishers offer services to clients like strategy, custom research, and consulting. Inc. Studio offers clients access to its proprietary measurement platform, BrandView. Russey says BrandView allows Inc. Studio to “work in a way that we and our clients understand what’s going on with their program.”

The Trust – The Wall Street Journal | Barron’s Group, formerly WSJ. Custom Studios, services Dow Jones brands Barron’s, MarketWatch, Mansion Global, and Financial News, and offers clients insights about what content performs best for different audiences by tapping into Factiva, the Dow Jones’ intelligence product.

“Are we a media agency? No we’re not, but we have the same kind of analytical performance and targeting and media planning capabilities that some of those do that we use to create the experiences that we create,” said Steven Nottingham, general manager of The Trust.

Data and insights are also critical to Bloomberg Media Group’s offering. In combination with its creative and editorial capabilities, the agency “transforms insights intelligence into strategic thinking,” said Anthony DeMaio, head of US sales at Bloomberg Media Group. The studio uses AiQ to drive insights for clients. In 2018, Bloomberg Media’s digital advertising revenue grew 15 percent, compared to Bloomberg Media’s 16 percent year-over-year growth.

Business publishers say data and insights are critical to the future of branded content. “It’s not really just about creating native ads. The point of it is about driving these experiences and driving breakthroughs in authentic ways using the audiences and the platforms. And that’s not going to be about native ads in the future, it’s going to be more progressive, more involved, more data-fueled, more performance-centric, and that’s the contemporary capability that we are building at the Trust at the Wall Street Journal,” Nottingham said.

The post Business news publishers are investing in brand content studios to attract more B2B clients appeared first on Digiday.

“The key word is focus,” said Owen Wyatt, managing director of The Stylist Group. “Eighteen months ago we had to place bets, particularly if we wanted to be a growing business rather than a shrinking business. We didn’t want to wait for those elusive million-dollar partnerships which the whole industry is briefed on. We have a ruthless focus on campaigns between £50,000 ($60,700) and £100,000 ($121,000).”

Pitching for campaigns with unusually high budgets and typically tight turnarounds can be a resource drain. When these deals don’t materialize or are won by other content studios, it’s not just demoralizing but inefficient. While the process of pitching for work that you don’t win is unavoidable, by squarely focusing on a smaller cross-section of campaigns and targeting a list of 100 potential clients, Stylist is boosting its chances.

For instance, for British Airways, Stylist scouted out the airline’s two least-popular flight routes and approached the brand with two branded content articles. This led to a £150,000 ($182,000) partnership including branded content articles. Wyatt estimates that two out of five times this approach of proactively contacting marketers, and not waiting for pitches, wins business.

“This [£150,000] is an amount that’s not insignificant but also is attainable,” noted Bruce McGowan, head of content partnerships at Publicis Media, who has worked with Stylist in the past. According to McGowan, Stylist has approached Publicis twice in the last six months with content ideas.

Stylist isn’t alone. Other publishers, particularly digital-first businesses, are this proactive with agencies, but Stylist has noticeably improved its pitch approach, according to agencies. “Perhaps a year ago they could have been accused of sitting back on their reasonable readership,” added McGowan. “But they are well-regarded and have clearly invested in the team.”

Stylist is now running between 10 and 15 branded content campaigns a week across print, video and digital, said Wyatt. Between April and June, around 40 campaigns were from new clients since the publisher has expanded beyond fashion and beauty brands to advertisers like opticians Specsavers and contact lens company Acuvue.

The bulk, 80%, of Stylist’s digital revenue is from branded content but programmatic has seen a boost too. Stylist has doubled its audience by increasing the amount of content it publishes and honing its SEO and paid social tactics. This lets the publisher leverage more private marketplace and programmatic guaranteed deals, where premium inventory can be bought at a higher price in exchange for a guarantee of quality.

For now, 20% of the publisher’s digital revenue comes from programmatic advertising, 80% of this display inventory is sold on the open exchange, where factors like demand and targeting impact CPMs, in some cases lowering CPMs below £5 ($6.05). “We are getting to a place where we are going to be far enough on the front foot to start pushing back on bids at that level,” said Wyatt. “We want to work with brands who value quality and are prepared to pay for it.”

Stylist is now running roughly five PMP or PG campaigns a month. Recent PMP campaigns with luxury brands Hermes and Burberry have fetched CPMs of over £20 ($24.29). The goal is to increase the number of these deals possibly by hiring several new digital sales staff.

Currently, Stylist has 113 employees. Since mid-2017 it’s hired around 25 in digital specialists, focusing on areas like programmatic, data and digital content creation. Family, the content studio has around 10 people. Reportedly 20 roles were lost when Shortlist’s print edition was shuttered.

The post ‘The key word is focus’: How The Stylist Group grew digital ad revenue 72% appeared first on Digiday.

Spark Foundry has similarly reevaluated what it considers video in recent years. About two and a half years ago, the agency combined all video platforms, whether in-home or out-of-home, under the purview of its video team, said Shelby Saville, chief investment officer at Spark Foundry. That move enabled the agency to take a more complete view of the video landscape and find opportunities to extend the reach of TV and video campaigns “in case we’re not getting the reach we want in traditional TV or digital video,” she said. The agency uses GSTV to drive foot traffic for clients with quick-serve restaurants and retail stores, in particular.

The executives interviewed for this article declined to discuss GSTV’s ad rates, but Quicken Loans CMO Casey Hurbis described the company’s pricing as “fair and consistent.”

GSTV streams videos and ads over the internet to its screens that span more than 23,000 locations across the country. That internet-based delivery enables GSTV to aim ads at individual locations, which enables advertisers to use GSTV to supplement the reach and frequency of their TV and video campaigns. Additionally it works with companies like Nielsen to cross-reference credit card data from gas stations, including their adjoining convenience stores, with advertisers’ first-party data in order to pinpoint brands’ ads and measure their sales impact.

As audiences tune out of traditional TV and into ad-free fare like Netflix, advertisers are seeking out all opportunities to reach people with their 15-second spots. For these marketers, GSTV has emerged as one of those opportunities despite being historically categorized alongside billboards and bus stop signage as an out-of-home platform. “We’ve had a couple clients and teams recommend [GSTV] be used as a frequency extension if we feel like there’s an audience that’s being underserved in television,” said Saville.

GSTV has been looking to capitalize on ad buyers’ interest in opportunities to offset TV viewership declines by angling to compete in the annual TV-and-video upfront marketplace. This year the company has had more than two dozen meetings with advertisers to pitch for their upfront budgets, according to GSTV CEO Sean McCaffrey. In those pitches, the company has talked up the 93 million adults in the U.S. that it claims it reaches every month, as measured by Nielsen, — up from 75 million adults in 2018 — as well as the TV-like qualities of its ads that play at full screen with the sound on between videos from media companies such as Cheddar, First Media and Chive TV as well as sports leagues like the NFL and NHL.

One question that GSTV faces as it angles for advertisers’ TV and video dollars is whether people are actually watching its screens while they pump gas. And it appears that people do watch. The company performs eye-tracking studies and consumer surveys to measure viewership. In a pitch deck that GSTV has shared with advertisers and agencies this year, the company claims that 86% of people watch or listen to the screens. For PepsiCo, the question of GSTV’s viewability has not been an issue. The company has conducted brand recall and purchase intent studies for its GSTV campaigns, and the results of those studios “make us confident that it’s working,” Brady said.

While GSTV may seem to be an odd fit in the upfront consideration set, it has been able to merit consideration alongside TV networks and digital video platforms. “When we go into the upfronts, GSTV has historically been one of the partners where we make an annual upfront investment,” said Casey Hurbis, CMO of Quicken Loans. He has been buying ads on GSTV for at least seven years, dating back to when he was an automotive marketer at Fiat Chrysler Automotive and where he said GSTV was viewed as a cable network. “I’ve never really looked at [GSTV] as an out-of-home placement. I look at it as an extension of our broadcast buy,” said Hurbis.

The post ‘An extension of our broadcast buy’: Advertisers are buying ads on gas station screens appeared first on Digiday.

Why is FAST a term that I should care about?
FAST services are seen by media companies and advertisers alike as an opportunity to recapture audiences that are no longer tuning into traditional TV all that much and increasingly adopting ad-free streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. These services offer a wide array of programming from different content providers, including film-and-TV studios and production firms, for free. Therefore, as more subscription-based services like Disney+ and HBO Max enter the market, these FAST services may see a rise in adoption if viewers seek out services that can round out their entertainment options without adding to their monthly bills, which is why TV manufacturers like Samsung and Vizio have rolled out their own FAST services. Publishers and TV networks are increasingly adopting these services to make extra money from their existing programming and grow their digital ad sales. And advertisers are taking an interest in them to reach audiences watching TV or TV-like content on actual TVs and to aim their ads at those audiences using digital’s more precise targeting options.

How are publishers and TV networks using these services?
Publishers with large digital video libraries are using these services to repurpose the videos they have previously published to YouTube, Facebook and their own sites and apps. They can either package that content into episodic series to license to these services, or they can create their own linear channels on the services and either sell that inventory themselves or receive a share of the revenue from ads sold by the services’ owners.

For TV networks, the story is largely the same. However, the option to sell their own inventory provides TV networks with an opportunity to pitch more granular targeting options to advertisers dissatisfied with traditional TV’s comparatively limited age-and-gender categories. As a result, some TV networks are using these services to distribute digital-only channels, as ABC has done with ABC News Live on Roku Channel and Viacom has done with more than a dozen channels it is adding to Pluto TV.

Are audiences actually using FAST services?
Yes. Tubi has said that more than 20 million people use its service each month, Viacom has said that Pluto TV has more than 16 million monthly active users, and Xumo has said that its service has 5.5 million monthly active users. Amazon, Roku and Walmart have not disclosed audience sizes for their respective services. For whatever it’s worth, Walmart has said that Vudu has more than 25 million registered users, and Roku has told ad buyers that the Roku Channel is the third-biggest ad-supported app on its connected TV platform.

OK, but I’m confused. Aren’t some of the services categorized as FAST pretty different?
Correct. All of the aforementioned services offer libraries of licensed TV shows and movies that people can watch for free on demand with ads interspersed. However, Pluto TV and Xumo also offer TV-like linear channels that are designed to replicate pay-TV providers’ programming guides and make it easier for people to find something to watch.

Why are all of these services being lumped together as FAST then?
Because FAST has quickly emerged as the shorthand for referring to these services. Other terms have been floated. For example, the aforementioned TV network exec said his team had considered referring to services like Pluto TV and Xumo as “AVOD linear” but decided against because that term, which is fully spelled out as “advertising-supported video on demand linear,” was an oxymoron.

So the industry might need to come up with terms to break down FAST services even more in order to prevent confusion?
Yes please.

The post WTF is FAST? appeared first on Digiday.

It was a risky bet; Hippo had just raised its seed round and didn’t have any customers yet. It was the first product the company would bring to market. In exchange for some equity, the fledgling brand and agency worked close together to build a user interface that would give users an insurance quote in a minute or so.

Young brands are often allergic to outsourcing agency work. The idea goes that founders can cut costs and keep a brand true to its essence — as well as own the overall customer experience — by doing it all themselves. For Hippo, working with an outside agency required buy-in for both parties: Hippo had to shed the mentality that early-stage DTC branding can and should be done completely in house; Work & Co took a chance on a cash-strapped startup in exchange for equity that wasn’t sure to pay off.

Today, Hippo is worth more than $1 billion dollars, thanks to a $100 million round of funding announced last month.

In the case of Hippo, Work & Co saw a company where their expertise could really shine to help it scale. Over the course of a few months, Work & Co built a consumer-facing interface to more seamlessly onboard new customers. The insurance company’s back-end plugged into various data sources that would make the quote-getting process faster. What Hippo needed was a way to easily — and beautifully — translate that to potential customers. Together, the two teams built an on-boarding platform that asked users only a few questions and instantly gave an accurate estimate for how much the insurance coverage would cost.

Traditionally, explained Ramaswamy, getting an insurance quote is long, boring and arduous. It requires answering dozens of queries on a static online form, followed by a call from a representative who will likely ask the same questions again. This first Hippo product would make for a completely different experience — which is why the founder felt they needed more experienced designers to help lead the way.

“We set a goal with ourselves to create the best customer experience that we could possibly come up with,” said Aviad Pinkovezky, Hippo’s chief product officer. This sign-on interface would be Hippo customers’ first interaction with the company and would dictate the company’s overall tone.

“Big companies usually rely on agencies to get another perspective,” Pinkovezky said. “In our case it was different.” The company wanted to “tap into [Work & Co’s] experience.” Hippo saw the agency as a necessary partnership to fill talent gaps upon which the company’s branding relied.

During that first project, the workflow was much more personal than an average agency gig. Work & Co was sharing daily progress updates with the founders. For the brand, the agency-startup model was “completely proven,” according to Pinkovezky.

From there, Hippo set up a product development formula with Work & Co. Following the on-boarding project, Ramaswamy’s team helped build Hippo’s mobile claims process. After that, Work & Co was again brought on to aid in the insurance startup’s total rebranding. Meanwhile, Hippo scaled; most recently Assaf Wand, the company’s CEO and cofounder, told Fortune that the company has done “north of $150 million in premiums.”

According Pinkovezky, the early partnership was integral in setting his company’s trajectory. “This was a great way to get access to very high quality talent,” he said. “For a startup so early in its life cycle, it would be very very difficult to get access.” As Pinkovezky saw it, collaborating with Work & Co was a way to hire a veteran team he couldn’t otherwise bring in-house. “Mohan and the team were able to complement and challenge us in a good way,” he said.

Conversely, Work & Co’s expectations evolved. At first, Ramaswamy’s team filled a design void. Hippo, then, was scrappy and staffed by people with non-creative expertise. Today, the company employs an in-house design team led by a creative director. “It’s a bit of a different model,” said Pinkovezky, compared to when the agency first signed on. Work & Co has become “more of an extension of our team,” helping the company “get additional perspective into key projects we’re working on.”

“Many agencies won’t consider it the best use of their time,” admitted Pinkovezky. “But when it does work, the value is immense.”

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