Mojo Supermarket has named Nichelle Sanders its new managing director as the agency looks to build its clientele while maintaining its reputation as a “non-traditional” agency, said Mo Said, Mojo founder and creative director.

Sanders succeeds Kendra Schaaf, who joined Mojo in 2020 when it had three employees and no clients. Schaaf is helping with the transition and will exit in February.

Sanders joins from R/GA where she was managing director for the New York office, overseeing clients including Sephora, Ally Financial and Procter & Gamble. Prior to that, she served as a client partner for Vice’s creative agency Virtue. Sanders also has experience beyond the agency world—she was head of marketing & strategy for AFROPUNK and spent seven years leading marketing efforts for Bluhammock Music, a record label she helped launch under Sony Music.

Said noted that Mojo was seeking the right person to focus on growing the agency's business while also managing day-to-day operations, including client relationships.

Schaaf “helped me set up a lot of systems to be able to be Mojo Supermarket, and she’s so good at that.” Said said. “Mojo 1.0 was us doing all these earned attention things. And then 2.0 was us getting all these AORs and big clients like Match, Truth Initiative, StockX, and Bleacher [Report], now it's like, 'Okay, how can we do our type of work for these people across the calendar year?' I think Michelle's going to help us with that.”

Diverse background

Said said he was “stressed” while looking to fill the position, which took a few months and meetings with over 20 executives.

Sanders’ diverse background, which also includes a stint in the finance space, led to her hiring, according to Said. Said added that he was looking for someone with a background outside of advertising to “run the company” without changing its “non-traditional” agency mindset.

“I think that it was really important for us to not change, but to grow,” Said said. “We want to still do this thing where we're changing a brand over time, but we're doing it through this earned attention thing that we do really well.”

Sanders says R/GA’s recent restructuring, in which the agency moved to a “country model,” effectively removing an emphasis on positions that were tied to certain cities or offices, was “one of the many factors” that played into her decision to join Mojo.

“I haven't really had this opportunity in advertising to do something much closer to the inception,” Sanders said of four-year-old Mojo. “R/GA is a 46-year-old agency. I think it has a lot of legacy and history that's amazing. But I think the opportunity just to build a new legacy and a new way of walking into the world was just something I couldn't pass up.”

Part of Sanders' job will be to help clients understand how effective Mojo's approach to culturally relevant work is. Both Sanders and Said pointed to campaigns for Truth (see below) and Bleacher Report, which they said delivered strong results but declined to share specific numbers. 

“Everyone knows the world is changing,” Sanders said. “A lot of my job is to make people comfortable with the fact that our approach actually makes it easier for our clients to outsmart versus outspend … It's really about pulling the levers of culture and pulling the levers of real consumer experience to outperform what the alternative is and build that case with the evidence that we've got.”

More clients like Match

Mojo first started getting noticed in 2020 after “hacking” the Oscars and creating attention-grabbing work for Girls Who Code and Savage X Fenty. Since then, the agency has picked up clients including StockX, the Truth Initiative and Match, as well as having grown its headcount to 61 employees at one point. Mojo currently has 50 employees and notched $16 million in revenue last year, according to the agency.

Said said the new hire will help free him up to focus more on the creative side of the business. Part of the agency’s strategy moving forward will be focused on adding clients that have similar budgets to a client like Match with the ambition to invest in a “long-term business transformation,” he said.

“We're obviously always game for exciting work,” said Said. "I think there are brands that do traditional marketing that is at the $2-3 million creative account [level] that want to do marketing in a different way.”

Earned attention

Moving forward, the agency will put an emphasis on social work. “Earned attention comes a lot from social—what used to be the AOR is now the social AOR—and you can use social AOR to get to interesting earned attention work,” said Said, who is anticipating smaller marketing budgets across the industry moving forward.

“People are going to spend less money, but that also means people are going to be smarter about it, hopefully. And the people that are going to be smart about it, those are the [clients]  we're trying to find now. I don't think any agency or any brand is doing social well. Most of them that are doing it well are doing it in-house.”

Sanders will also help the agency grow the IP portion of the business, which includes original projects. In November, Mojo launched “The Slavery Cup,” which took aim at Qatar, FIFA and the United Nations over human rights concerns in the Middle Eastern country as well as allegations that thousands of migrant workers died from poor working conditions while building the World Cup stadiums. 

Other examples of Mojo's focus “beyond traditional advertising,” said Said, include proprietary research on Ramadan and Muslim representation in marketing; developing a hot sauce for Bleacher Report; and setting up an art gallery in the agency’s lobby featuring local artists.

But Mojo still wants to hold onto its social activist core. Said noted, for example, that the shop won’t submit “The Slavery Cup” work to any award shows, despite many people telling him it's a “good awards piece.”

“We actually want to make it a point to not submit it to awards, because that was a personal thing to me and a creative here,” he said.