Aloha from Portland,
Benjamin Franklin (allegedly) said that there were two certainties in life: death and taxes. We could probably add advertising as a third piece of the stool. While we aren’t here to talk about taxes, we did learn a little something this week about death and advertising from CO-Lab, a Portland agency that was founded last year by two former Nike executives, Keith Crawford and David Odusanya.
Agencies and brands alike continue to look for ways to differentiate. In looking at the latter—brands—there is a rush to elevate to the lauded “Challenger Brand” status. Some categories, even in the challenger category, are starting to get flooded.
One could argue that there may be some tiers emerging in this space: mature challengers (think Dollar Shave Club), rising challengers (Visible comes to mind here) and new challengers emerging onto the scene.
For agencies, differentiation is clearly imperative. As some (erroneously, in my mind) tab agencies as losing relevance, along comes one with an idea that, after learning about it, makes all the sense in the world. It is one of those, “of course someone would pursue this” moments and could signal an interesting rush to an industry that hasn’t had much innovation: death care.
“We realized very early on that the reason [the death care industry] hasn’t evolved is that it lives in a vacuum,” Crawford said. “No one wants to think about it until they have to and, when they’re in the middle of it, they want it to be over as quickly as possible."
In fairness, Solace, the brand CO-Lab has created, is not the first in direct cremation (then again, Dollar Shave Club wasn’t the first to sell razors, either). But what they’re banking on is becoming the best—a more efficient and highly customer-centric experience—a common refrain heard from the darlings of beloved neo-brands.
While it’s still early and there are many more to come in evolving a space that is indeed ripe for disruption, the thing to remember about Solace is that it’s an idea that came from an agency. And last time I checked, agencies are really good at coming up with ideas … something that any brand, challenger or not, could always use.
In other news this week …
Moves: Kantar brought in Microsoft exec Reed Cundiff as North American CEO (pending the sale of WPP’s majority stake, of course). Yashica Olden is now Ogilvy’s global D&I executive director. A former Donald Trump confidante has landed in Birmingham, Ala. as an agency president.
Nascar meets Westeros. There were more than 100 brand/Game of Thrones collaborations.
If this agency’s design pitch in 1973 were accepted, McDonald’s would have looked very different … and groovy.
Pretty sure you heard that Accenture Interactive bought Droga5. Deloitte Digital’s Heat sent some empathy doughnuts and aspirin.
Agencies continue to get on the Amazon-focused boat. Check out why Dentsu Aegis has joined the fleet.
Worth a read: Freelancer Tanya Kureishi dishes on what she learned in her first month working in advertising.
Worth a watch (tissue recommended): Bud surprised NBA star Dwyane Wade with people whose lives he changed for the better.
We’ve got more agency news over our sister site, AgencySpy. If you’re already a reader, thank you.
As always, feel free to kick over your agency news and notes to me at doug dot zanger at adweek.com. Have a lovely weekend, and we’ll see you back here next week.
Warm Regards,
Doug Zanger
Senior Editor, Creativity + Agencies
