Brands like Minute Maid hire this company for quick campaign ideas from mystery experts

What if you could get an idea tightly tailored to your brief, delivered in one week for a fixed price, but you had no idea exactly who came up with the concept? That’s the business model two former agency executives, Eric Segal and Brett Banker, have created with their consultancy X&O. X&O utilizes a network of freelance executives such as chief marketing officers, creative leads and strategy experts to work on client projects on an as-needed basis. For a fixed fee, X&O’s experts can answer a client brief through “sprints,” with ideas delivered as fast as in one week or in as long as eight weeks. Most projects aren’t about executing ads but rather are focused on solving business problems and finding the big idea for a campaign, positioning or creative platform. Once the idea is sold, the client owns it and it is generally passed on to another agency to execute. X&O makes it a point to not reveal who its employees are, instead citing generalized credentials when pitching or responding to a brief. See all of Ad Age’s 2024 Creativity Award winners here This new company model comes as more agencies continue to open and redefine their services to become more consulting-focused. Banker was most recently a managing partner at Anomaly. Segal was the chief creative officer for Anomaly in New York, departing in 2020, a year before it was bought by Stagwell. Since then he has served as a fractional CCO at other agencies including McCann and Swift. The partners formed their agency out of frustration with what they called the traditional agency process of giving work away in pitches and trying to maintain long retainer relationships while chronically understaffed. “At any given moment, Eric and I would get a question on a client and we would have maybe 10% of our capacity to put towards that problem, because we’re on five other clients and a new business pitch, and we’re running a department of 100-plus people,” Banker said, referencing his previous experience at other agencies. Currently, X&O has a roster of 85 experts; 24% come from a diverse background, according to the agency. To ensure its freelancers can respond to briefs quickly and focus completely, the agency does not work with anyone who has a full-time position. Read more about the industry’s gig economy Most of its employees remain anonymous. However, in some cases when X&O has been assigned longer-term projects, depending on the situation, it has allowed certain clients to meet its freelancers. “We’re in a positioning project right now,” said Banker, “where we have senior strategists that are going to be client-facing throughout the process.” Banker said the company has some flexibility on its rules as long as its principles remain the same. Those include that the agency will communicate only with high-level client execs, will work quickly, will not tolerate a lot of check-ins from clients and will not give work away for free. The costs of X&O’s sprints can be as low as $50,000 for one week and on average are around $150,000 to $200,000 for three to four weeks. Keeping employees anonymous allows them to feel “unencumbered” in their approach to an idea and that the work will be presented with less bias since there isn’t ownership over any one idea, Banker said. Generally, Banker and Segal present the final ideas that the team has come up with. A freelancer may present an idea if Segal and Banker feel it would make more sense. “On the client side, they don’t have to see a team of eight [presenters],” Banker said. “Eric and I can deduce all of that thinking into a cogent recommendation that comes out of one or two mouths throughout a presentation of an hour or an hour and a half, versus a team of eight or 10 people that have different perspectives that are sharing within an hour. And I think that at times can dilute the value of the solution.” Some X&O clients include Alibaba, Minute Maid, Shutterstock and Danish Creamery. It also created work for an unnamed agency that works with McDonald’s. Coca-Cola credited X&O for supporting a Minute Maid campaign starring Jon Hamm that launched in March. The campaign centers around the idea of Hamm not getting the chance to talk about the product because the juice “sells itself” due to its taste and zero sugar. While the campaign was created by WPP’s bespoke Coca-Cola Co. team Open X with support from other agencies, X&O worked with Minute Maid on the creative strategy that led to the core idea of great taste and zero sugar being a “zero brainer,” according to X&O. This was then handed off to Open X, which reshaped the idea to what became the final campaign. Open X’s work included coming up with the final tagline, building product-centric online videos, casting Hamm, and all final creative executions including an activation that will occur at the Las Vegas Sphere next week, Julianna Richter, WPP Open X’s chief communications and marketing officer and Ogilvy PR and social’s global CEO, confirmed. While 90% of its clients are brands, X&O also works directly with agencies to help them find creative platforming ideas. It does not normally execute ads but can hand work over to a roster agency or in-house studio, help a client find a production partner and, in rare cases, handle production itself. The agency doesn’t want production to be the core of what it does. “We’ll do it for the right client, under the right circumstances, as long as we can continue to move fast without the unnecessary processes,” Segal said. Banker said this new structure is part of a growing tide of CMOs who no longer want traditional agency-of-record relationships. “This thought that I have a forever partner that I’m going to be in with for 10 years, and they’re going to solve every problem I have just isn’t true anymore,” Banker said. “[They] need bespoke talent for bespoke challenges. So you’re seeing more clients going ‘Well, I'm going to handle that with my in-house team. I have my own production arm over here. I’m going to use that agency for that one thing or these few things.’” See all of Ad Age’s 2024 Agency A-List winners here ~ ~ ~CLARIFICATION: A previous version of this story misstated X&O’s relationship with McDonald’s. X&O worked with an agency doing work on McDonald’s but did not work directly with the brand.

Brands like Minute Maid hire this company for quick campaign ideas from mystery experts

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