Jessica Serrano, the chief marketing officer at Dig, had never heard of Beers with Friends when the agency cold-called her with a proposition that immediately caught her attention. The shop’s offer—to find ideas that solve a brand’s challenge in just five days, what it calls “Beer Runs”—led to the agency working with the restaurant chain on its fall campaign, and a deal for quarterly Beer Runs for each of Dig’s seasonal campaigns.

These fast-turn ideas for a fixed fee, generally called sprints, have been catching on in the industry as agencies including Barrett Hofherr, X&O, nice&frank, Dept, Liquid Agency and Fortnight Collective, among others, look for ways to gain new business from clients in an increasingly project-based world. For some shops, the short time commitment helps them get a foot in the door that could lead to more business, even agency-of-record assignments. For clients, using a sprint approach is a relatively safe way to satisfy a demand for faster, quicker and cheaper brand content, concepts and strategies.

“We’ve spoken with over 200 brand marketers in the last year, and the two things that we hear most often are that marketers are looking for low-risk ways to try new things, and that time has become a more pressing constraint, more so oftentimes than money,” said Dana Hork, CEO of Beers with Friends.

Hork should know: She was head of social media for Walmart from 2017 to 2019, where she met James Wood, who at the time was an executive creative director for Publicis and worked on the Walmart account. Wood is now Beers With Friends’ chief creative officer.

Co-creating rather than executing

Before joining Dig, Serrano worked at Taco Bell, where she was director of brand marketing and a senior director of marketing strategy. During her tenure at the Yum Brands-owned chain, Serrano said, she worked with agencies such as Deutsch LA but also utilized Collider Lab, Yum’s in-house strategic consultancy. Working with Collider was similar to a sprint model, she said.

“We always had a separate stream of work with Collider Lab where we could bring them a business problem and they would basically help us to get our brief tight before going to Deutsch,” Serrano said. “This sprint process felt very familiar in all the best ways to me.”

Beers with Friends allowed for more “co-creation,” said Serrano. “The traditional [agency] model is, ‘Here are three to five concepts that are pretty far along and polished,’” but Beers with Friends “brought me 30 pieces of paper with ideas and we sat in a war room and they pitched it rapid-fire style, threw it up on a wall,” she said. “They created an environment where there was no need to hold back.”

This way of working also helps Serrano to delegate duties to all of her agency partners. “I have a document that I can share with an integrated team of other agency partners that still play a really important role in our plan, but they’re not all going off and pitching me different versions of a campaign,” Serrano said. “Now they don’t start the work until I’ve presented them with like, ‘Here’s the idea.’ Now I need you to go execute your part.”

“We don’t want to be your agency of record. We want to be your agency on speed dial,” Hork said.

Evolution of a trend

The sprint concept isn’t entirely new. Some agencies have long made speedy strategy a selling point of their offerings without labeling the processes as sprints.

Goodby Silverstein & Partners launched its Brand Camp offering, which offers a six-week accelerated strategy workshop where brand and agency leaders brainstorm marketing solutions, in 2014. Over the years, Brand Camp has helped win business with clients such as PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz and Blackstone.

“Brand Camp is not just about being an accelerator. It’s also about moving upstream with clients as marcom and advertising continue to be pushed further downstream,” said Bonnie Wan, GS&P’s partner and head of brand strategy. “It’s an opportunity for us to continue to have a seat at the table with the C-suite, not just the CMO, but the full C-suite, and for us to have a stronger bird’s eye view into the brand and the business.”

Fitzco added its version of sprints, called Spark Sessions, two years ago. They recently helped the agency win an account, said CEO Evan Levy, who declined to name the client. Those sessions typically last at most 48 hours, he added.

Since adding a sprint offering three years ago, Matt Hofherr, partner and chief strategy officer at Barrett Hofherr, said his agency now averages about four sprints per quarter. Hofherr declined to name specific clients using the offering, but this year the agency has completed sprints for a Major League Baseball team, a leading high-tech public company, a startup brand, a national media company, a national homebuilder, a global fashion brand and a global gaming company, Hofherr said.

In addition to adding a new line of business, sprints can help agencies in other ways. Nice&frank, founded in 2022 by Graham North, who launched Brand Camp while at Goodby, does creative “frankshops” with brands and also creates ads if the client wants. Its model led to Häagen-Dazs ending its recent creative pitch early and naming nice&frank as its lead creative agency, according to North, and brainstorming ideas for a Super Bowl ad.

“Some of what the sprint models are doing is they’re bringing in clients as co-creators of the brand, as opposed to approvers of creative ideas. And the trust that you build in that space is better than any piece of paper of an AOR contract,” North said.

Read more about Häagen-Dazs’ agency move

Talent and pricing for sprints

Senior experts with hybrid skills are essential to successful sprints; Hofherr said at least three “seasoned partners” are involved in every sprint at his agency. “Candidly, mid-level talent often requires more time than the sprint allows to fully address a brief,” he said.

Beers with Friends staffs its agency with wide-ranging freelance experts. It has worked with a creative director who was also a runner-up on the TV show “MasterChef,” a brand strategist who is also a magician for celebrities, an executive packaging development engineer, a startup founder/former CMO and a culture expert who is a former sneaker brand narrative manager.

Sprint agency X&O, which has around 85 freelance experts, works with CMOs, creative leads and strategy experts. It makes it a point to keep those freelancers mostly anonymous unless a project becomes longer term or there is a unique client need.

Multiple executives said it’s crucial to have employees who work well with time constraints and collaborate for a successful sprint setup. This type of approach differs from when the creatives or strategists that North categorized as “cave dwellers” like to be given a task or brief and then work alone before coming back with the right solution.

Each agency has different ways of packaging its sprint offerings. Beers with Friends, for example, offers 60 Beer Runs, such as strategy for a TikTok campaign, a rebrand or holiday campaigns. The shop currently works on one client project at a time but offers 12-pack Beer Runs, which means clients can preorder sprints and schedule them to be used in the future. Beers with Friends declined to comment on the cost of its sprints. 

A sprint at Barrett Hofherr can take five to 25 days; it uses an agency day rate to calculate how much a sprint would cost.

X&O’s main proposition is to have three solid ideas by three experts in three weeks. The agency also offers shorter one to two-week engagements and longer five-to-eight-week sprints. X&O’s sprints can be priced as low as $50,000 for one week and average around $150,000 to $200,000 for three to four weeks.

Since launching, X&O has worked with clients such as Alibaba, Minute Maid, Shutterstock and Danish Creamery. Coca-Cola credited X&O for supporting a Minute Maid campaign starring Jon Hamm that launched in March.

Several executives said their offerings were inspired by the design sprints introduced in 2010 by a former Google designer, Jake Knapp. The agency Dept offers design sprints priced at an hourly rate. Its sprints are mostly six to eight weeks long, but it also does sprints in as little as one week and its longest lasted for 10 weeks, said Josh Porter, a partner of digital products at Dept. The shop has conducted sprints for clients such as Bose and Fidelity.

Fortnight Collective has what it calls a “BrandHack” process, a two-week sprint process that spends five days on strategy, a half-day creative workshop with the client, a creative presentation the next day, a round of revisions and then asset delivery. The client can then add production services if needed. Fortnight has a three-tier pricing system. Tier one costs $50,000 to $75,000, tier two costs $75,000 to $125,000 and tier three costs over $125,000. Pricing varies based on the number of teams and deliverables.

Tyler Hilker, the VP of strategy at Kansas City, Missouri-based consultancy Crema Agency, which also conducts design sprints, said the shop experimented with flat fees but found they weren’t sustainable. Its sprints typically cost $20,000 to $40,000, depending on the ask.

Liquid Agency incorporates what it calls “Silicon Valley Thinking” and conducts four-to-eight-hour “swarms” with clients broken down into days or weeks. It conducts about 100 swarms a year, said CEO Scott Gardner. One of its clients, Ernest Packaging Solutions, orders about 25 to 30 Swarms a year.

More: Agencies should get paid (and stop doing work for free)

Speed isn’t everything

The benefits of sprints are clear. If done right, they can expedite the new business and ideation process for clients. However, North said the challenge for agencies becomes knowing what can be sprinted and what should stay the same. “I’m not advocating that every agency become a sprint agency,” Wood said. “Sprints are very good for lots of things … but not everything can be done in five days, and even when we talk about execution, craft takes time.”

Christina Rogers, senior director of communications at Charlotte, North Carolina-based agency Luquire, said the focus on getting paid for quick work can be a “dangerous North Star.” Sprints can be the right solution at times but don’t fit all client needs, she said.

“It risks shifting focus from what’s best for the client’s brand and business to what’s best for the agency’s bottom line,” Rogers said. “That said, sprint models done right can be an incredible demonstration of partnership and business strategy chops.”

While it does not use a sprint model, Supernatural AI uses its AI platform that it said can handle 70% of the work at any stage of the advertising process for its employees while never replacing employees. As a result, the agency bills itself as being able to do work at least twice as fast as any agency, but Mike Barrett, chief strategy officer at Supernatural AI, added that it shouldn’t be at the expense of the work.

“Speed is something that is really easy to understand, and that is always in demand,” he said. “It’s not surprising that a lot of agencies are [adding sprint models], but going fast is one thing, going fast and doing it well is another.”