Hysterical Reenactment: A visual medley of the Martin Agency's work, as interpreted by Fast Company (and, yes, that really is Andy Azula, an agency creative director and star of his own UPS ads).
They may have discovered fire and invented the wheel, but Neanderthals have a tough time getting respect. People--Homo sapiens, that is--are always mocking their stone tools and dissing their loincloths, walking around all upright without giving them credit for getting there first.
Same thing if you want to run an ad agency out of Richmond, Virginia. People point out there's no branch of Nobu there. André Balazs has yet to establish an outpost. The nearest Prada store is 340 miles away. As one Manhattan marketing executive sniffed after visiting a client in the city: "I did everything that was cool in Richmond--it took me an hour and a half."
Despite those drawbacks, folks at the Martin Agency--the ad shop that has channeled Neanderthal angst so successfully for GEICO--have managed to adapt to their unlikely setting, just like their unibrowed mascots. They have developed new strengths. They have evolved. And this year, they showed those Zegna-wearing, saketini-sipping megalopolitan hipsters just how far they've come: In January, they landed the creative slice of the $580 million
It's not as if the Martin people have just emerged blinking from the cave. The agency was founded in 1965 by a couple of local ad executives, David Martin and George Woltz. Early on, they poached a rival's brightest talent, Harry Jacobs, who, in turn, lured a young writer, Mike Hughes, to the company. Under the Jacobs-Hughes team, the agency quickly got noticed, with Advertising Age ranking it as one of the top-10 creative shops--in 1981.
By the 1990s, Martin had moved beyond regional advertising, landing national accounts on the scale of Mercedes-Benz and Wrangler jeans. But there were lean years, too. And in 2003, Hughes (now president and creative director) had a run-in with lung cancer that forced him to take a close look at his life and his legacy. Soon afterward, he recalls, "Andy Azula [an agency creative director] said to me, 'Right now, we're not feeling like a creatively driven company.' That kept me awake, night after night."
The conclusions he came to in those sleepless hours were clearly good ones. By the end of 2006, Martin had been named one of Advertising Age's top-five agencies of the year; Adweek judged its "Testimonials" and "Cavemen" campaigns for GEICO to be two of the top three for the year (trumped only by
The story of how the Martin Agency got its mojo back is not one of some transformational epiphany or monumental business decision. It is a tale of adaptive success, the power of chipping away at a problem until a razor-sharp idea emerges. It's about letting go of industry habit and doing what works now. That may sound simple, but only from the outside does it look so easy a caveman could do it.
Set on a quaint cobblestone square, with a fountain out front that once watered dray horses, the Martin Agency's new red-brick headquarters mimics the narrow windows and Italianate style of its 19th-century neighbors. Inside, it's all Wi-Fi, fiber optics, and fine art. Mike Hughes looks more Middle America than Madison Avenue, favoring a rumpled Big & Tall chic over the all-black cladding of his New York peers. But Hughes, a big, John Madden--like guy, is indisputably one of the creative giants in the industry. Adweek called him one of the "nine best creative directors in America";
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