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| Wexley School for Girls co-founders Ian Cohen (left) and Cal McAllister have built a successful ad agency with a series of offbeat and humorous projects. |
When war-weary Afghans make their way to the polls next
month to choose a new president, their effort will be a significant indicator
of America’s success in bringing democracy to the region. Playing a minor but
important role in that crucial election is Wexley School for Girls, a small
Seattle advertising agency in Seattle that has been hired to advise the U.S.
Army how to bring out the vote among tribes in outlying areas, and whose
primary means of communication is word-of-mouth.
“The strategy has everything to do with presenting the ideal
of voting,” says Wexley co-founder Ian Cohen, “and the freedom of a better life
that may come from it.”
Will the company succeed? It’s a daunting task, and the
outcome is far from clear. But Wexley has shown an uncanny ability to match
each client with the tactics and strategy—often unconventional, sometimes
bizarre—most appropriate to the situation. The business’ success is clear from
its impressive client roster, which has included the likes of Microsoft, Nike,
the Seattle Seahawks, PepsiCo and Virgin Mobile. The firm had revenues totaling
$8 million last year after doubling in each of the past four years.
When Wexley School for Girls was given the job of promoting
the Seattle Sounders FC soccer team, it faced some tough odds. The Seattle
economy was weak and fans had become discouraged by the poor performance of
their professional sports teams. The Sonics had left town while the Mariners
lost 100 games last season. The Seahawks had only four wins last season, and
even the UW Huskies football team lost every game. Factor in a moribund economy
and Wexley had its work cut out.
The agency, working closely with the Sounders organization,
devised a strategy aimed at developing the passionate support for soccer that
exists in much of the rest of the world. The “Scarves Up!” campaign focused on
the tradition, common among fans in Europe and Latin America, of waving scarves
in the team colors to support the team. On the Sounders’ opening day, each of
the 22,000 season ticket holders was given a scarf. And Wexley staged a “March
to the Match” prior to the kickoff to rev up the crowd, a tradition that has
continued with each game this season. When the opening game began, the fans
were so enthusiastic, they could have been mistaken for having come from
another country. Wexley’s campaign brought together the important ingredients
that—when combined with a successful team—galvanized the fans and mobilized
unexpectedly strong support behind professional soccer.
Tapping in to New Media
There is no easy explanation for Wexley’s success. But from
the beginning, it was launched with the goal of being different from the rest.
Six years ago, co-founders Cal McAllister and Ian Cohen left their jobs at
traditional advertising agencies. They wanted not to become a little boutique
agency but to tackle the immense opportunities presented by emerging new media.
“We had a lean couple of months when we decided we didn’t
want to do traditional stuff,” says McAllister.
Clients weren’t immediately sold on their unconventional
approach. “When they [Wexley] first started, I think a lot of people wondered
whether they were just some crazy creative guys goofing around with their
careers,” recalls Frank Clark, creative director of SquareTomato, another small
advertising agency in the area. “Well, they stuck to their guns and built a
valuable brand around ‘the crazy creative guys,’ which, as it turns out,
companies like Microsoft desperately needed. So, they are actually one of the
best positioned, most distinctive agencies out there.”
The big break came in 2004, when Nike let Wexley film a
short video for the web. Web videos were still rare then, so the agency didn’t
have a lot of competition from traditional advertising agencies.
Their film short, Winner Takes Steve, was a summer-camp spoof written by the Wexley team
and directed by Jared Hess, who later that year released his cult hit Napoleon
Dynamite. Nike liked the piece so much, the
company aired it on a loop at NikeTown stores across the country, on the Nike
website and at more than 20 film festivals, including Slamdance and Seattle’s
SIFF. More important, it became an internet hit.
“The stars did align for us when Nike threw us a little bit
of money and trusted us,” McAllister says. Nike and other big brands were
launching smaller marketing divisions that were looking for just the sort of
ideas Wexley was developing.
Following on the success of the Nike video campaign, Wexley
continued to come up with new and unique marketing ideas: “Hey Genius” was a Microsoft
recruitment campaign designed to attract the nation’s best talent by staging
interviews inside a hot tub (the “Job-cuzzi”); “National Snow Day” had 60,000
pounds of ice trucked to Austin, Texas, and crushed to replicate a “snow lodge”
to lure customers to then-fledgling Copper Mountain Ski Resort; “Dwayne Wade’s
Head” was a T-Mobile campaign in which Wexley built an interactive pavilion
inside a giant head at the 2007 NBA All-Star game; and most recently, an
enormous printed Sounders scarf was draped on the side of the Tully’s/former
Rainier brewery as part of the Sounders campaign.
Going Mainstream
Nowadays, the kind of guerrilla marketing championed by
Wexley has become part of the advertiser’s standard toolkit.
“Back then [in 2003], we were going to clients asking to
carve off some of their budget” for nontraditional campaigns, Cohen says,
“whereas now, clients have budgets and divisions devoted to it. ... So, we’ve
seen a complete role reversal.”
The critical component of Wexley’s success continues to be
the creativity by which the company approaches each new job.
“The creative that comes out of this place astonishes me,”
says managing director Brian Marr, a relative newcomer to Wexley and seven-year
Microsoft veteran.
Wexley takes an intelligent and impactful approach to its
projects, a sentiment McAllister echoes, contending that humor is often the
best approach to a successful campaign.
“Sometimes, when you’re an uninvited guest, the best way to
make a friend is to make that person laugh,” McAllister says. “Often, marketing
is an uninvited guest.”
Wexley may strike some as over-the-top; the office décor
includes plaster busts of Nostradamus, Mark Twain and Elvis in the board room,
a Chinese restaurant theme in the lobby and a nine-hole mini-golf course in the
creative department, “behind the sweatshop [interns and production],”
McAllister says. But what makes Wexley so successful is its ability to harness
the unconventional in the service of clients’ needs.
“What might be ‘wacky’ to a conservative group looking at it
from an ad standpoint is not even on the scale of ‘wacky’ to the target of
college-age students. We try to do what’s relevant and right for the target
market,” McAllister adds. And sometimes that target market is looking for something
more traditional than snow or hot tubs.
“We’ve done plenty of serious work,” says Marr, referring to
clients such as MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving). The Wexley team, in an
effort to increase awareness of the hazards of underage alcohol consumption,
went to various Seattle high schools on the day of the prom and painted “Every
48 seconds, a drunk driver makes another person eligible to park here” in
handicapped parking spaces.
Although many new media commentators will say the future of
advertising is all about interactive niche-targeted marketing, and while they
trumpet the demise of the old means of advertising—namely print, radio and
television—the Wexley team is wise enough to see the big picture,
“The best way to reach people is still where they are,”
Cohen says. “We can get as niche as we want, but to reach 200,000 people in one
city, a billboard or TV spot still might be the best way. And radio during
drive time is not going away.”
“In five years, Wexley is going to do a ton of TV because it’s
going to be a really cheap buy,” Cohen adds half-jokingly. “It’ll be like
vinyl; it’ll be really cool to do TV. And airplane banners, they’ll be a lot
more of that.”
“And skywriting,” laughs Marr.