Madonna Badger and Debby Reiner team up to form Futura Collective

Madonna Badger and Debby Reiner are joining forces and their decades of experience to form the new agency Futura Collective alongside fellow senior executives formerly of Grey and the Badger Agency. While Futura Collective is something of an expansion of the existing Badger Agency, it’s actually what Badger and Reiner are calling a “mashup” to form a new shop, the latest in a recent slew of new startup agencies. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs ‘A new chapter’ after 25 years Badger will continue in her role as chief creative officer, while Reiner will be CEO of the new agency. Joining them at Futura as founders are Kelli Tuggle as president and Celeste Holt-Walters as chief content officer. Tuggle was most recently chief operating officer of Grey North America. Holt-Walters led production at the Badger Agency for the past decade. “Madonna has had her name on the door for 30 years, and we don’t take a name change lightly at all,” Reiner said. “But after much conversation, we came to the conclusion that it wasn’t just about adding names to the door. It was about starting a new chapter, much more future-oriented, and also a collective of people.” Badger and Reiner have years of familiarity working together on brands for Procter & Gamble Co., among others, including on current agency client Clairol when it was a P&G brand (Wella Co. now owns Clairol). In addition to P&G and Wella, the agency also works with Target. Combining efforts to form a new agency seemed like a natural move, the two said in an interview with Ad Age. They’ve been discussing the idea for the past six months. “Madonna and I have actually known each other for 25 years,” Reiner said. “We have worked together as partners and collaborators on different sides of the table. At one point, I was actually her client many years ago. We always hit it off and had an enormous amount of respect for each other and found our skills were super complementary. So we always felt there was some kind of destiny for us to work together.” Badger’s former agency partner Jim Winters retired in 2022, the same year Reiner retired from Grey, where she’d been president of global clients and before that was CEO of the New York office. Reiner’s work with P&G goes back decades, and Badger has long worked on P&G brands. Badger noted all the new agencies opening recently, but said Futura Collective stands out by combining an established independent agency with new experience in running big global agencies. “I’ve always prided myself working with billion-dollar companies in a really scrappy way,” Badger said. “What Debby brings is big-agency background, very global and understanding what those companies are looking for and what they need.” That includes, Reiner said, what Futura bills as an “MVP talent model,” where senior people will work on every project, drawing from a staff of 30, many of whom are from the Badger Agency. See all of Ad Age’s 2024 Creativity Award winners here Futura Collective’s almost all-female leadership team is unusual in the industry. “It’s not in any way trying to keep people out,” Badger said, noting that Zachary Graney, the new chief financial officer (former global chief commercial officer at Grey Group) is also on the agency’s senior team. “But we have always been really focused on marketing to women.”

Madonna Badger and Debby Reiner team up to form Futura Collective

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