There are three plasma screen TVs in Arnold Worldwide’s lobby at its Boston headquarters, running a reel of some of the best advertising in the country.
And on the 21st floor, home to Arnold Brand Promotions, gold museum frames showcase the business results of Arnold’s top clients — including Celebrity Cruise Lines, Hasbro and Jack Daniels. The real masterpiece is a graph that shows the aggregate growth of all of Arnold’s clients outperforming Standard & Poor’s.
Those pictures, worth a thousand words and about $54 million in revenues, illustrate the one word that wins Arnold Brand Promotion the 2006 crown as PROMO’s Agency of the Year: integration.
Arnold brings world-class advertising creative below the line and makes it blossom, with sponsorships, events and word-of-mouth that makes marketers’ mouths water. This homegrown division of Arnold Worldwide has dismantled the barriers to agency cooperation (like separate P&Ls) to open a wellspring of seamless marketing that burnishes a brand’s image in every medium.
For all the agency networks that tout integration, why is it Arnold that consistently delivers? It comes down to the agency’s structure and its culture.
Arnold Brand Promotions has a dedicated staff of 40 account people who work with Arnold Worldwide’s 550 or so creative, planning, research and production staffers. Tyson’s banners for its “Protein Patrol” sampling vehicles come from the same creative team that does the cheeky “Powered by Tyson” TV and print ads. Fidelity Investments’ TV spots starring Sir Paul McCartney, and its fulfillment letters for a bracelet premium with McCartney’s autograph? Same team.
“Our creative staff is world-class talent, and they’re never going to take a job at a promotion agency,” says Beth Rice, executive VP-director of Arnold Brand Promotions. “But they’ll work for my little promotion agency.”
Arnold Worldwide formed Arnold Brand Promotions in 1997, recruiting Rice from Boston ad shop Hill Holliday to run it. (Rice spent eight years overseeing promotions and events at Reebok before her three-year stint at Hill Holliday.)
“I said we should have the word ‘brand’ as part of the name, and we should never replicate the creative department — just fold promotion into the ad creative department,” Rice says. “I wanted those guys at my table.”
Two years ago, Arnold Worldwide adopted a single P&L, and now tracks its business results by client, not by agency division. That lets brand insights — not budget allocations — drive the work. Tyson CMO Bob Corscadden says it best: “They don’t forget to bring one another.”
When an RFP arrives at Arnold Worldwide, the agency forms a pitch team that includes an Arnold Brand Promotions exec. The pitch team collaborates on research to hone brand and consumer insights, then the ad and promo divisions brainstorm separately. The team reconvenes to share ideas, then build out the best few to pitch. “Once we took away the financial hurdle, it became easier and faster to get to the right answer,” Rice says. “We know we’ve landed on the right idea when everyone starts shouting, ‘We could do this’ to execute it.”
That all-for-one structure also helps creative teams be more, well, creative. “They had been taught to think about TV and print, but now they can think beyond that,” says VP-Group Account Director Michael Carey. “The sky’s the limit.”
Witness the Super Bowl blitz for Mobile ESPN. Arnold Worldwide created a 60-second TV spot, “Sports Heaven,” that brought the breadth of ESPN’s mobile-phone content to life: A pedestrian passes dozens of athletes (and a marching band) as he watches ESPN Mobile while he strolls down the street. Arnold Brand Promotions built out a Sports Heaven Lounge in the six-story ESPN Magazine House one block from Ford Field; the lounge touted ESPN Mobile’s tailored content by offering free tattoos (“the ultimate in customization,” Carey says) and showcasing artist-designed boots from Timberland (another Arnold client).
Longtime client Heidi Korte, Volkswagen’s brand promotions manager, saw the integration evolve, too. Creative staffers who worked on VW’s event marketing “attended our events and saw firsthand what it took to bring a brand to life in the marketplace. They worked side by side with colleagues and the client: That made the relationship magic because we could get these creative people out to the streets. There’s a different type of thinking for advertising creative and event creative, and these individuals understood it.”
And when Arnold Brand Promotions gets its own RFP? It pulls research, planning and creative resources from Arnold Worldwide. It seems like a no-brainer: Build brand-savvy promotions by using advertising tools that crystallize the consumer insights that determine brand image. The promotions team taps Arnold’s brand planning and business insight departments — common tools for ad planning, but rare resources for promo shops. “Those are huge assets for us. That alone gets us to the right answer very quickly,” Rice says.
Tyson’s Corscadden says Arnold delivers the kind of integration that many agencies promise. Tyson hired Arnold (in 2004) because it has “extremely strong” promotions and good advertising.
“We’ve been in other agency relationships where they say they have an expertise, but it’s usually a sister shop and they don’t really work together. So you have to bring them up to speed, and it’s like dealing with another arm,” he says. “Arnold operates the way they said they do: It’s part of the same team. We don’t have to brief five people on five separate occasions. The work is integrated because they’re all up to speed on that strategy.”
Arnold helped Tyson negotiate and plan its first-ever full sponsorship of the U.S. Olympics Committee, for the 2008 Games in Beijing and the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver. Tyson begins using that as its marketing platform this year, building up to a 2007 blitz that leads into the 2008 Games. It has already sprouted grassroots, putting Tyson at 41 Junior Olympics events, nine national championships and two titled championships (on broadcast TV) so far this year, says Tyson brand manager Chad Fox.
Tyson also will sponsor U.S. Track & Field and is talking to a few winter sports teams (think skiing).
“They said, ‘Figure out how to do the Olympics,’ so we started with one team — USA Gymnastics — to see how it feels to consumers, retailers, and Tyson employees, and to see what it would be like working with the USOC,” Rice says. Tyson sponsored the team’s post-Olympics Tour of Champions, targeting “strength providers” (also known as “moms”) in stadiums and supermarkets nationally. “Our client would see 10,000 to 15,000 moms and kids in an arena and say, ‘This entire place is filled with my customer,’” Rice says.
The tie-in “resonated with us, because moms and kids are our target, and gymnastics was a pretty pure property, not over-leveraged,” Corscadden says. The tie-in played well with retail and foodservice customers, too: “For the first time we weren’t giving away tickets to a male-dominated event. It was someplace they could take their daughters.”
Arnold also helps Tyson “learn our business, figuring out what works in different channels of trade and still stays true to the strategy,” Corscadden says. “They’re very creative problem solvers.”
Top-notch integration didn’t insulate Arnold from a devastating lost last year, when Volkswagen of America moved its entire $400 million account to Crispin, Porter + Bogusky after 10 years at Arnold. The promotions work had been stellar; Arnold won 30 awards last year alone for VW work, including the PRO Award for Best Creative for its Sundance Film Festival Lounge. Arnold’s Alpha Drivers word-of-mouth program helped launch the redesigned Passat. VW invited current owners to register as one of 5,000 “Alpha Drivers” to get a first look at the new Passat (and a 24-hour test drive), and evangelize VW to friends. Drivers earned points by chatting up the brand, then redeemed them for iTune codes, Teva sandals, gift cards. The top 25 Drivers earned an iPod Nano; a sweeps for all Drivers awarded a two-year lease on Passat. VW got 5,000 registrants in three days — 6,320 in all — who pitched the brand to friends nearly 90,000 times and brought in 843 test drives.
The key was “bringing in only people who want to hear from you, and bringing them behind the curtain, deeper into the brand,” says Arnold Brand Promotions Senior VP Jamie Tedford. (And research was half the goal: “You can hear the true voice of consumers in an unfiltered way.”)
Arnold Brand Promotions’ “clever tactical ideas” built buzz, Korte says. “It’s not enough for us to receive logo impressions. We’re looking to make a unique connection with each person we touch. The [agency] team came up with some innovative ways to make that connection.”
Those successes — VW’s 2003 Year of the Blues music and film program, its 2004 Sundance Film Festival sponsorship, its tie-in with W Hotels to prompt test drives for luxury Phaeton — brought the dubious honor of … more work.
“We started gaining so much attention internally that the brand promotions team was tapped to do more and more,” Korte laughs. “We didn’t grow our resources; we just grew our workload.”
Estée Lauder hired Arnold Brand Promotions last year to create a campaign just for Nieman-Marcus. Arnold developed the Estée Lauder Compact Museum, showcasing its collection of designer perfume compacts from the last 40 years. The display traveled to about a dozen Estée Lauder stores last year; it boosted traffic and built so much buzz that other stores requested the exhibit, and the tour was extended for 2006. “It was a real challenge working for a company that’s as picky about design as Estée Lauder, and a retailer that’s as picky about merchandising as Nieman-Marcus. And here we are, designing these beautiful displays that pleases them both,” Rice laughs.
She says the best clients “are very brave. They respect our expertise, they trust us — and they know a good idea when they see one.
“Channel neutrality is a given,” she adds. “The question is, what’s the right mix, and how do we get there? It’s significant that an agency not built to do promotions has been able to do world-class work.”
Work worth framing, in fact.
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