Best Agencies 2024: Orchard

In December 2022, Orchard learned that Dan Hamilton, chief marketing officer of its signature client Ocean Spray, had died suddenly. Eight months later, the wife of one of the agency’s founders, Barney Robinson, passed away after a long struggle with cancer. In April, the shop lost its largest client when Danone chose to consolidate its business with BETC Havas. “We were staring into the abyss,” the agency wrote in its Ad Age Agency A-List entry, “with some big decisions about how to move forward.” See all of Ad Age’s 2024 Agency A-List winners here But Orchard made the right ones. It pitched—and won—two big accounts in Etsy and Georgia-Pacific’s Quilted Northern, along with projects for Ford, Boston Beer, Penguin Random House and celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey. The shop did not lay off any of its 40-plus staffers. And it ended the year with flat earnings. “It was a challenging year, but weirdly it was unbelievably satisfying at the same time because we overcame every challenge,” said David Kolbusz, chief creative officer at the agency, which posted $20 million in billings for 2022. Orchard credits its resilience to its business model and close collaboration of its partnership trio: Chief Strategy Officer Laura Janness, CEO Robinson and Kolbusz, the last of whom joined the agency only six months before these events. “When the walls started to cave in, I felt like it was caving in with people that I trusted and that I believed in and I had the confidence to know would help get us out of the ditch,” said Kolbusz. “So, there wasn’t a minute that we were like, ‘Oh, we’re fucked.’” Robinson said there was never any thought of a layoff. “Our primary thing will always be how do we look after people better than another agency would,” said Robinson. “It is incredibly important to us philosophically and operationally when hard times come, they will come for everyone. And that’s in part by witnessing all the things that have been done to wrong people at previous agencies.” Ad Age A-List and Creativity Gala Buy your ticket to the in-person event Click here Calling the loss of Danone “briefly inconvenient,” Robinson said, “We made all that revenue up pretty quickly and there was never a question that we would sacrifice people for that.” Janness attributes the wins to the agency’s operational model, which gives strategy a seat at the head of the table. “The reason why I personally wanted to start Orchard was to rebuild the model because it’s so broken at agencies” by giving strategy equal weight with creative, said Janness. “I think that’s evidenced in not only our new business wins but the demand we now have in the pipeline.” Kolbusz calls the approach “unreplicable. It genuinely is the fusion of creative and strategy and the work coming first. We don’t have creative director teams, we don’t have copywriter and art director teams. We have strategists and creative teams. And it’s a competitive advantage.” “What I found so specifically unique about Orchard is the role of strategy and creative living in parallel,” said Brad Minor, VP of global brand marketing and communications at Etsy, which hired the agency last June to handle holiday creative. “Sometimes (with other agencies) it can be strategy handing off to creative, but this felt rooted, and there was no room for miscommunication in a handoff or lack of prioritizing strategy in the handoff. It was all inextricably linked.” For Etsy, Orchard seized on a nugget mentioned in a client communication: mission shopping. That drove the creative approach of people on a literal mission to overcome what Kolbusz calls “the high-stakes moment of dread to find the perfect gift.” The nail-biting musical theme from “Mission: Impossible” underscores the spots, that show, for example, a woman on the hunt for a one-of-a-kind gift for her very tall significant other who loves to cook—a custom-fit apron. The effort was so successful that Etsy green-lit a Super Bowl spot this year that imagined our 1880s forefathers struggling to find the French a reciprocal gift for the Statue of Liberty. (They decide on a cheese board.) “Orchard has a ton of conviction in the creative, but not at the compromise of the business needs,” said Minor. “At the end of the day, they hold us accountable to the brief. They don’t get married to an idea that is really creative but far off the brief.” Another attraction for Etsy was access to Orchard’s principals and the agency’s overall attitude, said Minor. “They were inclusive of us as thoughtful brand partners, not ... ‘Here is the client—eye roll,’ or that they were indulging us,” he said. “They understand and respect our brand and our buyers and our sellers.” For Silk Nextmilk, the shop made the point that it isn’t your parents’ dairy by featuring the children of celebrities who once sported a milk mustache in cow’s milk industry campaigns. David Beckham’s son Brooklyn, Christie Brinkley’s daughter Sailor and all of Shaquille O’Neal’s children were among the “nepo babies” featured in the campaign. The social and out-of-home ads resulted in 5.4 billion impressions. To promote Arnold Schwarzenegger’s book “Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life,” Orchard dreamed up an activation punking fans of the “Terminator” star—making them think they were interacting with his AI alter ego before the Governator himself emerged from a specially constructed booth to surprise them. But perhaps Orchard’s toughest creative task was to repeat the success of its 2022 Ocean Spray “Wiggle Jiggle” campaign that swept the awards show circuit. “It was actually the clients who really pushed us to do a sequel for that spot,” said Robinson. “They pushed us quite hard to replicate it as closely as possible.” Once again, strategy led the way, unearthing the insight that fruit punch was back in the cultural zeitgeist. That yielded the concept of spiking party punch with Ocean Spray, which cues the mad wiggling and jiggling that made the first spot so hilarious. The “Power Your Party” ads powered Ocean Spray’s juice sales rise of 6%, and dried fruit sales for the brand were up 11% year over year, according to the agency—proving the client’s instinct was right. It’s this mutual trust with clients and employees that Janness said makes Orchard work. “We’re five years into this agency. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt emotionally safe as an entrepreneur. I don’t think that exists,” she said. “There’s constant pressure and constant competition. And so you don’t ever feel a sense of peace. Very rarely, I think, do we even feel a sense of accomplishment. We just move very quickly onto the next thing. We’re not prone to celebrating or congratulating ourselves or one another. And it’s not in a negative way. I think you just learn to perform and keep performing and keep showing up.” And that, said Janness, was how the agency was able to weather a very rocky 2023. “I don’t think about this as a comeback or the walls crumbling or falling in,” she said. “I think of this as a story of strength and partnership and overcoming challenges with respect to one another, to our employees, and still making really great work we can all be proud of along the way.” See all of Ad Age’s 2024 Agency A-List winners here

Orchard triumphs over turbulent year

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