REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION
March 10, 2025
A-List & Creativity Awards 2025
NO. 6
How Known turned losing a quarter of its business overnight into a year of growth
By Jack Neff
Known launches its original hot sauce in Times Square. Credit: Team Known
Known had a great year in 2024, but it didn’t look that way at the start.
As of late 2023, luxury fashion phenom Farfetch had a global campaign in production with Known and an ambitious media plan that included a Super Bowl spot. Then came the retailer’s sudden collapse in December 2023, followed by a rapid sale to Korean retailer Coupang. Farfetch fired its entire C-suite and canceled all those ambitious marketing plans. Suddenly Known, with $124 million in 2023 revenue, lost more than a quarter of it overnight and had a $35 million hole in its budget.
That might have put some independent agencies under. Instead, Known rebounded with dozens of new client wins. Not only did the agency replace Farfetch, it grew the 2024 top line by 6%.
Among the wins were a media agency-of-record assignment for Moderna, plus other work for Dick’s Sporting Goods, ADT, HP, SAP, Spotify, Cocomelon, Mattel, Clairol, Celebrity Cruises, Disney, Pfizer, MasterBrand, Chef’s Table, The Girl Scouts, Toys“R”Us, Build-A-Bear, SeaWorld, Peloton, Broadway.com, Stifel, MooMoo, NBCUniversal, St. Jude and Bose.
Known also renewed longstanding relationships with more than two dozen other clients, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, TikTok, Sesame Workshop, Citi, The Knot, Ubisoft, Intuit, Rockefeller Center, CW, National Park Foundation, Warner Bros. Discovery, Hulu, Paramount, Shake Shack and Spectrum.
Those client assignments cover a wide range of work mixed and matched to what clients want. Pegging Known as a media, creative or data and analytics shop is nearly impossible. It does them all, plus it creates original programming for Netflix and Hulu as part of a business that has taken off in the past year to include developing programs for Fox, iHeart and Amazon Prime Video.
Calling Known an “integrated media and creative agency with data insights” is descriptive, but only in the way “horseless carriage” describes a car, said Chairman-CEO Kern Schireson. “Marketing operating system” might be a better description, he said. But he added, “We don’t quite have it yet.”
Descriptive challenge or not, it clearly works. The agency of about 250 people includes teams in 80 countries, handling dozens of clients with a combined top line last year of $132 million. That puts Known’s revenue per employee at nearly three times the average for a digital agency, per Promethean Research.
In the past year, necessity and new clients were the parents of invention for Known. That included launching an AI-powered Segment Simulator that lets marketers interact with customer proxies. Work for Moderna led Known to develop an integration with Federal Emergency Management Agency data to rapidly identify disaster areas and pause media placements there. Known also developed a Causal Modeling system to find the upper-funnel brand messages that lead to lower-funnel conversions. And Known launched an experiential practice built on those tools with work that included the first AI-powered phone booth in the U.K. for a Spotify business-to-business campaign.
“As devastating as [losing Farfetch] was, it was the impetus for a massive amount of innovation,” said Kasha Cacy, chief media officer of Known. “I wouldn’t say it never would have happened, because it would have. But it probably happened much more quickly.”
Known’s resilience also comes from its breadth of clients and focus on efficiency.
Remarkably, the agency works for most of the giant digital platforms, including Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and TikTok, renewing contracts and growing work for most of them in the past year. Likewise, the agency renewed and expanded business with entertainment clients that included Disney, Paramount, Netflix, Hulu, Ubisoft, YES Network, the Knot Worldwide, Univision and NBCU.
Known can manage conflicts with so many competitors in the same verticals in part because it’s often not doing the same work for each one, but also because of how its compensation is structured, said Schireson. Known contracts to be paid a guaranteed amount that will cover staffing and costs, plus incentives based on key performance indicators agreed to with each client, so the agency and client interests are aligned.
Much of the agency’s work revolves around using its Skeptic AI tool and other proprietary systems to optimize brand and performance campaigns continuously. While Known is media AOR in some cases, such as with Moderna, it also operates alongside other media shops and in-house operations at other clients to apply its Media Opportunity Analysis process.
“Our position is to be not just different from but incremental to media agencies and in-house media teams,” Schireson said, “even if we are not the ones doing the physical buying.”
The agency’s work may go beyond media buying, but it can pull the buying part off in some unusual ways. Known used Zeam, a free streamer for local TV news, sports and event coverage, to buy 100 Super Bowl ads in local markets in 2024, each featuring John Stamos addressing viewers directly in those cities.
For Shake Shack, Known put its AI chatbot, The Big Lebotski, to work tweaking a rival. After Chick-fil-A changed its policy on selling only antibiotic-free chicken, Known helped Shake Shack execute a promotion to offer free, antibiotic-free chicken sandwiches via a promo code on Reddit.
The Big Lebotski scoured Reddit for the best places to highlight the “Chicken Shack” offer, identifying the phrases most aligned with the idea. The effort generated 13,000 clicks in the first 10 days while slashing cost per thousand by 43% and cost per click by 25%.
Known also turned Netflix’s longest-running hit, “Chef’s Table,” into a full-fledged business, replete with a new logo design, website, original content, live events and experiences. The effort included an e-commerce platform with merchandise designed by Known. The project used Known’s full scope, including research, strategy, creative, design, social, data science and media teams.
That’s one example of what Schireson calls “expanding the terrain in which we do marketing.” That involves developing software, AI tools and big data sets.
“To me, that’s the paintbrush that we need to be painting with,” Schireson said. “It includes those things, and a bunch of imagination applied to all these new methods and ways of understanding and reaching our audience.”
Reprinted with permission from Ad Age. © 2025 Crain Communications Inc. All rights reserved.
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