Barkley
Barkley is an idea.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
In 2010, I left a career in New York to move to Kansas City to join Barkley. At that time, Barkley had three big things going for it:
It had just lost its biggest client and half its business.
It had no strategy department.
It wasn’t afraid to invest in new ideas and take chances.
Over those years, I had the chance to help reimagine not only what an advertising agency was but what a creative company could be. Ultimately, I understood something the marketing industrial complex has a very hard time understanding: brands are the business and the business is the brand, inside and out. The idea that a brand is separate from the business is an old-fashioned and dangerous concept perpetuated by marketing professionals. The real world, the world of people, employees, consumers and customers see a brand as everything an organization does. Everything is the brand and the brand is everything.
Armed with that insight and some very smart partners and my role as Chief Idea Officer (overseeing the three idea centers), we created an entirely new business model for a creative company based on Whole Brand Thinking™, allowing us to have amazing growth in those years. Not only did we accelerate our lead-agency-of-record business, we became proficient at project work, including creating several business models from scratch. Financially, we went from being a 25MM advertising agency to a 100MM whole brand company, able to work on sustainability, internal culture, product and service innovation, design, experience, content, PR, and, yes, even advertising. We were also named a Forrester top 5 Lead Agency in the U.S., an A-List Agency Standout by AdAge and shortlisted for AdWeek Agency of The Year.
May The Most Whole Brands Win.
