David v. Goliath; Little Southern Agency Cocks a Snoot at the Big Guys on Mad Ave

This blog is about brands and how we can learn from the way they do a few things right and a lot of things wrong. But I can’t resist today celebrating a brilliant piece of self-promotion by a small, highly creative agency down in Charlotte, North Carolina.

John Boone and David Oakley are not some backwoods good ole boys, but two very smart creatives with big city credentials. John has put in some 20 plus years as an art director including stints at Team One where he helped launch Lexus and at Chiat Day where he worked on Nissan. Dave has worked in New York as a writer and creative director at Y&R and TBWA/Chiat Day. Both have a collection of statues from Cannes, the Clios and The One Show—the world’s leading creative competitions. In 2000, they decided to hang out their own shingle and see what kind of big brands would fight their way to Charlotte, a city known for banking but not advertising.

In the last nine years they’ve done some memorable work for clients like Ruby Tuesday restaurants and CarMax, but somehow those big tasty accounts—even the few that when they got fed up with the big agencies in New York and were ready to look “out of town”—haven’t made the turn to Charlotte.

Recently I met them at a digital conference in New York and it was apparent that they were hungry to make it into the big leagues. I do some consulting in this area and we were preparing to do a phone session, when I discovered that….they didn’t need me at all.

Instead they had come up with a story on their website about “Billy,” the fictional marketing director whose boss wanted an ad agency. “So Billy went to where all the agencies were (Madison Avenue). Each agency he found claimed to be different even though all were owned by the same four companies,” the narrator tells us. “So Billy picked one.”

Then the work was produced, but “no one noticed it. Because it was like the work of all the other agencies that were owned by same four companies. So Billy got fired. So Billy didn’t have a job. So Billy’s wife killed him.” [Sound of shots being fired.]

Now that’s a nice little story that has some elemental truth to it given that today 90% of the big agencies are owned by the same four holding companies and do often produce work, that for various reasons—often because big clients and their legal departments nibble good ideas to death—doesn’t get noticed. But as charming as this tale may be, just putting it on their website wouldn’t necessarily win John and David any business. First they had to figure how to get this message out to the world and they’re dirt poor.

So instead of buying ads in the Wall Street Journal, Adweek and Ad Age, they came up with a way of distributing their homily….for free. They just loaded the whole thing up on YouTube. It’s been about five days since their story went up, and, by my count, it’s already won 328,760 views on YouTube and probably 100,000 from other reference points. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elo7WeIydh8

The bloggers loved it: “BooneOakley’s new website made us grin wryly and raise a glass,” said AdRants. “The work is joyful, the animation crappy and the humor shameless.”

“Points to BooneOakley for self promotion and experimentation and risk taking….,” says Adhack.

Of course bloggers don’t pay the bills. But the work now has caused enough of a buzz that the media is starting to pick up on it, and, yes, says John Boone, they have started to get queries from actual clients.

Will they go on to win $20 million pieces of business and be able to buy Jay Leno’s collection of vintage 1940 Chevys? Not yet, but maybe. For my money, they win the prize in just knowing how to use their craft and wit to build their brand utilizing the challenging new frontier called social media, where brands have to be so interesting and entertaining, people are drawn to them instead of the other way round. It’s a “pull world” and Boone Oakley has broken the code on how to get it done.