Meet the new agency that knows you hate ads

Marcel Yunes and Rick Williams know that everyone swipes past Instagram ads and spaces out during commercial breaks. That’s what Williams said is the core idea of the duo’s new agency Fable.works: “Nobody loves ads.” Although, after a brief and dramatic pause, he clarified, “Or at least things that look like ads.” After a decade-plus working together for agencies BBDO and R/GA and freelancing for the likes of Wieden+Kennedy, Mischief and Netflix, the award-winning creative partners launched Fable.works last week with the ambitious goal of shifting what ads look like entirely. With Fable.works, Williams and Yunes want to move brands away from interruption marketing to spend more resources on integrated branding, which Yunes described as “behaving a little bit more like an influencer that is posting, that is communicating with their audience on a much more constant basis. ... rather than, ‘I'm going to shove this message down your throat because I paid tons of money for this media buy and I want to tell you everything that I can about my product with very little emotion and humanity.’” "Most clients will spend 20% of their budget making creative work," said Yunes. "And then the other percent plastering it on interruption media everywhere, which everybody is constantly ignoring. And we're saying, 'Hey, you should behave differently than that. You should look at inversing those numbers.'" Subscribe to Ad Age now for the latest industry news and analysis. The idea is to make every ad with the same creativity, engagement and enthusiasm as a Super Bowl ad, with sights set on even larger returns. While 96.4 million people watched the Super Bowl on February 7, 2021, Yunes and Williams argue that organic integration into platforms like TikTok or streaming entertainment can grab those numbers and more every day, driving engagement that people return to over and over again. “It's about making culture, not interrupting culture,” said Yunes. “Like speaking the language where you are instead of trying to retrofit and add to fit in the platform, which is really powerful for us.” The co-founders point to examples like Lil Nas X’s pentagram- and blood-adorned “Satan Shoes,” a branded short that won last year’s Oscar for Best Animated Short Film, and a series of KFC-sponsored TikToks from angry grandma influencer Lili Hayes and Wieden+Kennedy. @lilihayes You’re getting appitized! lol 🤦🏽♂️ @kentuckyfriedchicken ##trythekfcsandwich ##satisfiedcustomers ##ad ♬ original sound - Lili Hayes According to Williams, what works about the TikToks are that they aren’t ads, they’re actual TikToks. He explained the KFC campaign was “responsive. It was low stakes, high imagination and no frills.” But the Fable.works plan isn’t all TikTok and influencers. The team dreams of bridging the gap between the entertainment and business worlds, partnering with artists and storytellers of all disciplines. They imagine sitting in with Netflix showrunners to infuse a brand’s identity into the concept of a show rather than just dropping a product into shots. They pitch weaving brands into culture like Fortnite’s recent concert series, Kenny Powers’s segments on “FunnyorDie” for K Swiss or the BMW Films. “Brands, and all of us, have to stop looking at the world as customers,” said Williams. “They're our audience. We have an emotional relationship with them, a covenant between them, and the minute you start selling to them, you break that covenant. So, it's all about really reaching people in the moment as genuinely as possible.” Although Williams and Yunes have already initiated conversations with major brands, they acknowledge the path to shifting the way brands think and spend on marketing will be difficult. That’s why they decided to make the shift from major agencies to building a new one. Yunes described their attempts to inject their breed of advertising at past agencies as “trying to move the direction of the Titanic with two tugboats.” They now consider the flexibility of the self-owned agency is their greatest weapon, allowing for bigger swings at lower risk for greater potential reward. “It's an extraordinary opportunity to start from scratch. We get to start right, grow right,” said Williams. “We get a chance to shed the baggage of 100 years of an industry that needs to be restarted.” Subscribe to Ad Age now for the latest industry news and analysis.

Meet the new agency that knows you hate ads

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