Advertising Week Deep Dive: What Challengers Taught Me About Renaming Our Agency

I published my Advertising Week event recap earlier this week, but two sessions this year identified the same problem and discussed it from both sides. “How Challengers Win at Brand” put brand marketers from Boatsetter, Graza, and a brand strategy agency on stage to talk about building a brand without the incumbent's budget. On another stage, three agency founders talked about the brand everyone loves to work on, but nobody makes enough time for: their own.  

I run an agency that has been through a challenger-style transformation since I took over four years ago, and it’s now in the middle of renaming itself, so I took a lot of notes. And I’m also choosing to share this journey in real time as a “livestreamed” case study of sorts! Hope you enjoy the ride!

Can a 100-year-old brand be a challenger?

The panel opened with a line one speaker borrowed from a mentor: “The more I learn, the less I know.” That's the challenger mindset, and it set up the moderator's first real question. Can a brand that has been around for a century still be a challenger?

The answer was "Absolutely," with a caveat. The hardest part of being a legacy brand with a challenger attitude is organizational change. +10 votes on this from me! Getting people on board with new ideas and ways of working is like swimming upstream. Boatsetter's marketing lead, who previously worked at TOMS and Airbnb, separated it into two types. One is a challenger attitude in how you market and build the brand. The other is tearing up the operating model and trying to flip the category. In my experience, most legacy brands need to do the latter first, because you need believers on the inside before you gain believers outside.  

At Greenough, we did both simultaneously. The agency was 23 years in when I took the helm and we had a lot of organizational change to work through, which became alarmingly urgent when ChatGPT and the mass introduction of generative AI arrived three weeks into my tenure. It’s been the Wild West ever since, but I’ve never been more energized, and it was motivating to be with a bunch of leaders who went through this in the past few years and are excited, too. The rename is the outside half of that change.

Fewer, bigger bets

Here’s the proverbial rub we’re all contending with: challengers can't outspend incumbents, so the panel talked about where the incremental dollar goes. Graza, the olive oil brand, looks for partnerships and activations that can deliver outsized returns rather than spreading the budget thin. Its biggest swing is NASCAR. Graza is NASCAR's official olive oil and mayonnaise, and everyone laughs when they hear it. Its marketer said the internal business case took seven to eight months, selling it to sales, finance, the CEO, and marketing. The logic prevailed: it targeted tailgating and food culture, an audience that loves mayonnaise (who doesn’t?!), and a distribution footprint expanding into the same region, and so far, it’s working.  

Boatsetter told a similar story about an idea its marketing lead initially rejected: a rodeo on the water in Austin, with a mechanical bull, two-stepping, and a wake surfing exhibition. The point was to move people's perception of the brand from "boat rentals" to the experiences people want on the water. She said the activation generated massive earned value, and drew strong partner interest.  I’d personally like an invite to this!

Both brands also talked about copycats. Dozens of competitors, including private labels and much bigger companies, have copied Graza's squeeze bottle, and its share keeps growing. People buy the combination of product and brand, and the packaging alone can't be copied into a quality relationship.  

The Care Index: Know you, like you, love you

One speaker shared a framework her agency uses to model where a brand sits with consumers: do they know you, like you, and love you? Most brands are good at one or two of the three. A low "like" score often means consumers don't understand where the brand fits in their lives, and one brand raised its score with podcasts and custom newsletters that explained it. Company culture is one of the inputs to "love," because the agency's research found a strong connection between how employees feel about a company and how consumers do.

Boatsetter's marketing lead made the same point from the brand side. She argued that HR and brand teams can't sit in separate corners because everyone at a company is out in the world speaking on behalf of the brand. At TOMS and Airbnb, she said, the internal culture is what kept the business focused when everyone started copying the model. Our passionate team ready to shout the new name and the brand we’ve built together from the rooftops.  

Vibes won't get you the budget

The measurement conversation was the most practical part of the session. One speaker said marketers run on vibes more than they admit, and that vibes alone won't get you budget. Boatsetter's marketing lead also encouraged everyone not to let the data kill the vibes.

Brand should be held to the same kind of success metrics as performance marketing, just over a longer window, often 12 to 18 months. Boatsetter’s marketing team frames every conversation with their CEO around risk tolerance, and she builds in checkpoints so the business can double down quickly if something is working. Graza’s marketing department described their job as being believable to the CFO.  

The session's most counterintuitive advice came when the moderator asked how to convince an organization to spend more on brand. The answer: don't say “brand.” Frame it as a test, prove the concept, and let the results become data no one can argue with. Boatsetter has done exactly that over three years: starting with social, moving to incrementality tests in paid social, a music festival pilot, and then repeating the approach five times this year. Brand was under 9% of its marketing budget this year, and it's set to grow next year. Her advice to impatient marketers: right-size the bet and start small. We did the same thing with Marka without realizing it. It started as our BrandLab, became Marka+ Lab and a service offering, then Marka+ AI, the AI visibility reports our brand partners have received every quarter for over a year. By the time we chose it as our new name, it had already chosen us.

The cobbler's children

Then came the agency brand problem. I go to more than a dozen events a year for our brand partners, and I always leave with a few ideas for our own brand that never quite make the top of the list because our partners come first. The cobbler’s children have no shoes, after all. To be clear, our team has some fabulous footwear, but the adage is spot on, and it was refreshing to hear other agency leaders admit it out loud.

Guest House chose its name for kindness and simplicity: the agency works as a guest alongside brands' in-house teams and brings in guests who fit each project. Its founder joked that they'd spent years at "old white guy named agencies." But the name became a filter they never intended because the name turned away anyone who wanted to play the agency game. Visually, the logo was born when they typed "guesthouse" into a font they liked and made it pink, on the theory that a big agency would have killed the color choice, so they were ready to buck the trend.

Artists & Robots briefly considered a name built on “pckle.” But when its co-founder said that no matter who made a piece of work, "you should never know where the artist stops and the robot begins," the new name was born. The team debated a plus sign against an ampersand. She was on Team Plus, and the ampersand won. We had our own version of that debate with Marka, and the plus won. The name works as a litmus test too: prospects either light up and lean into the conversation or they don't, and either answer is useful.

Worst Kept Secret is an agency founded in 1964 that retired its founder's name after he did. Its speaker called the three-year renaming process "a long, slow archaeological process." Clients kept calling the agency a best-kept secret, and so did its majority investor, so the team turned the compliment into a challenge. The CFOs at a few clients were less sure about approving invoices from a company called "Worst." Its favorite runner-up name was "final. final," a nod to every creative's file folder. If you've ever saved a document as FINAL_rev2_actualfinal, this option is for you.

The panel's advice for anyone renaming an agency: admit that it's hard, take your time, say the candidates out loud to everyone you know, and live with the name before you launch it.

Greenough Communications Becomes The Marka Group

Those stories made me excited about our own pending name change to The Marka Group. Renaming a 27-year-old agency is our biggest swing, and like Graza, we made the internal case first. And I’ve been following the panel’s advice to say the name out loud before it’s official.  Marka+ started as our proprietary approach to brand after generative AI arrived, and it comes from the word for "mark" as in “trademark” in several languages and "brand" in others, which made the direction an easy one for us. We use a plus sign instead of an ampersand because the work is about our brand partners and us, AI, and more.  

The panel’s advice was to take a name change slowly, and we have. Hearing three agencies describe the same second-guessing and client conversations, down to a debate over a single character in a logo, made me feel much better about the time and care we've put in. We'll pace the launch, as having time is still the issue; we want our brand partners to feel the love before we do, but the team is excited, and the big reveal is coming soon!  

‍