An Ad Agency That Grows Its Own Clients

Most agencies complain about the cost of pitching new business, and they are right to. You’re giving away free ideas, you’re spending incredible resources with only a chance of winning. The whole thing contributes real energy to advertising’s downward spiral. But what if your agency had the resources and expertise to grow its own clients from within? That’s the story behind the York Creative Collective (YCC), and it’s an agency concept CMOs may want to keep an eye on.

YCC has the business surrounded.

I met with YCC president, Pam Hamlin, in the Boston office last week to learn more about this intriguing business model. It’s headed by founder and entrepreneur, Travis York, out of their Manchester New Hampshire office, and is part venture capitalist, part business consultant, and part marketer.

Pam told me the company seeks out and invests in ventures they believe in. Part of the deal is that the ventures have access not only to capital, but to the deep expertise of the larger YCC organization. YCC wants to be involved in the growth of these companies and are equipped to help in nearly every way.

Newly formed or struggling companies can access assistance for the basic business operations like accounting, IT, facilities and human resource services. But then they can also tap into more strategic services like business planning, financial/market analysis, and marketing planning. And then, once it’s time to go-to-market, there’s an advertising agency within the “collective” called GYK Antler and a video production house called Bigbrick.

Some of the ventures to which the YCC model has been applied:

• York Athletics — a direct-to-consumer athletic footwear company started by the founder, Travis York.
• Iron & Air — a media platform for motorcycle enthusiasts, including a printed magazine.
• Explorics — a SaaS service for marketing and e-commerce analytics.
• Noble & Cooley — a generations old drum equipment company, now with a fresh new start.
• Kompany39 — a sports media platform educating and inspiring the next generation of athletes by sharing first person insights and training tips from the world’s biggest superstars (starting with current NHL players).

Pam explained that YCC surrounds this collection of start ups, early stage consumer companies and established companies with nurturing business assistance. Which is interesting enough and fine for these companies, but what about established companies who may be looking for an ad agency? This is where I think the agency piece, GYK Antler, gets really interesting.

GYK Antler is but one part of a vertically integrated growth machine.

Every agency says they will work hard to understand the client’s business as well as the client does. They never do, but they’ll say that. And they will try, earnestly.

But think about what GYK Antler, the ad agency part of York Creative Collective, has access to. The account people and creative people not only have access to those who actually helped write the business plan and marketing plan for these ventures, they might have been part of the team developing those plans in the first place. That makes them more than perfectly suited for communications strategy and development.

But the fact is, in servicing these ventures, these “agency people” are experiencing a level of business insight and nuts-and-bolts not seen by normal “agency people.” So I have to think they bring this deeper business acumen to their general advertising clients (GYK Antler has several advertising-only clients, as well as the home grown venture-clients).

The ad industry is changing. YCC seems ready.

There’s a race to the CMO these days. The big consultants like Deloitte and Accenture see the CMO as the next opportunity for growth and are acquiring agencies and stealing advertising share. The specialists who focus on one thing—video production, social media, content, etc.—are carving out a nice living underneath the traditional agency. This squeeze is forcing traditional agencies to either evolve or die.

York Creative Collective is immunizing themselves from some of these dangers. Growing clients from within, providing deep consultation services not typically offered by agencies, an integrated production house and a creative agency as accustomed to reviewing P&Ls as they are reviewing creative briefs.

YCC and GYK Antler are going to be fun to watch as the morphing of our industry continues.