Boston-based boutique strategy and creative agency Heart, co-founded by former Hill Holliday ad executives Andrew Teman and Thomas O’Connell, all started with an inflammatory tweet in June:
Well, actually, it didn’t at all.
“While that tweet seems to have been the lightning rod, a lot of what precipitated [Heart] comes from Thomas and my working together and going beyond it...It was less about that place and more about the industry as a whole,” clarified Teman. “We began to hit a frustration point.”
The Oreo tweet that Teman refers to in his own 140 characters is, of course, the ‘You Can Still Dunk in the Dark’ ad that the brand sent out to its hundreds of thousands of followers during the Super Bowl blackout last year. 360i’s picture of the spotlighted Oreo, charged with catalyzing the industry’s obsession with real-time social media marketing, went on to score a Grand Prix, a Clio and five other ad awards at Cannes.
“It was strange to me...taking that image and deploying it to Twitter seemed to be something really simple," said Teman. "The fact that it was being held up as the grandest achievement in advertising by being given that award was emblematic of where things have been gummed up as an industry."
But it’s not that the current advertising as-usual system is entirely broken.
“That standard way of working isn’t going to go anywhere overnight," noted O’Connell. "It’s a very lucrative model for a lot of agencies — ourselves included."
Rather, there’s a growing desire to pick up the pace. Ad agencies should be able to “do the Oreo thing” without so much fanfare. That style of spur of the moment wit and acting upon creative impulses shouldn’t be a unique situation.
“We’re born out of the idea that this should actually be the norm and not the exception,” said Teman. “And we think that it can be.”
This idea of acting on innovative instincts is deeply woven into the startup’s philosophy. “The reason why we call ourselves Heart is that there’s a lot of brain thinking, a lot rationalization, and a lot of planning and risk mitigation that goes into it, but I believe our skill set is to constantly learn and do,” mused O’Connell. “It’s that ‘just do’ factor.”
But, as O’Connell and Teman became well-aware, this quick and creative tenet is tough, if not impossible, to realize within a larger agency, filled with more voices, albeit smart, clever ones, eager to be heard.
“With a lot of [minds] in room, people will feel that they have to contribute, and will tinker and tailor with that idea,” explained O’Connell. “It’s very difficult to keep the purity of that idea when there are a lot of layers being added to it.”
With the practical understanding that they couldn’t change an industry, O’Connell and Teman took their own advice and struck out on their own. “Rather than change the big ship, we thought, ‘Let’s go build our own boat,’” shared Teman. With Heart, they are unfettered from creativity-crumbling, pre-existing systems, and no longer beholden to people attempting to take the rudder.
“The only person we risk offending at the moment is one another, and we do a pretty good job at that already,” joked Teman.
Those still within Hill Holliday and other traditional agencies, however, haven't been all too bitter, according to the co-founders. Teman and O'Connell were pleasantly surprised when, after their two weeks' of notice were up, they were swarmed with emails from industry connections. "While they may not have been showing their support publicly, we had a lot of [agency] people still reaching out and saying something along the lines of, 'We're rooting for you,'" said Teman.
Less than a week after its July inception, Heart's co-founders had already begun receiving a great deal of interest from brands and startups within the city and beyond. To Teman and O'Connell, the Boston's business community in particular is a prime spot to launch its "startup thinking for brands and brand thinking for startups" mantra.
While the founding duo acknowledged the creativity amidst the thriving startup community within the city, Teman posited, "the North East can be a very buttoned-up, metrics-driven sort of place...And Boston, specifically, there's a bit of a vacuum of creativity in this town."
"[Boston] can be a bit apologetic. A lot of the startups we speak to often lack the chest-beating, evangelism, cult aspect of their personality and leadership that translates well into the real world," added O'Connell. "The idea seems to be that, 'Oh, well we built it, and therefore, it will deploy itself into the world in a natural, viral way.'"
Teman and O'Connell want to move brands away from a place of repetition. Push past the tried and true, and diverge from the tired, "we're like that, but like this," startup branding model.
"There's a negativity that comes with the word, 'brand' or 'agency,'" explained O'Connell. "But we really do have a passion in having people rethink where their head room can be, where they can find cultural significance, what behaviors are emerging and how can you future-proof your product so that, as you grow, you can accommodate new behaviors and new people. Getting that story first and foremost to people reframes what you do and gives full, inherent credit to your product."
Picture courtesy of Business Insider
