During the pandemic, creative vet Paul Caiozzo realized things weren’t working at Interesting Development, the small New York agency he founded in 2015. The shop, a former winner of Ad Age’s Small Agency Awards, was known for attention-getting work and branding for companies such as Vita Coco, StreetEasy and ZocDoc. But like other agencies in the industry, it struggled to keep afloat after COVID-19 hit. 

“From when we started, everything changed so much,” Caiozzo said. “The amount of time that we had to make creative work was half of what it was a couple years prior, budgets were shrinking, the number of agencies and pitches and the demands on what we needed to do were growing. It was getting harder and harder to make work that we were proud of.

“I had pretty much resigned myself to opening a pizza place.”

But ultimately, instead of rolling out the dough, he found data. 

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In June, Caiozzo closed the doors of Interesting Development and teamed up with two other seasoned agency players, former Heat and Deloitte execs John Elder and Mike Barrett, to start anew with Supernatural, what they describe as the world’s first “human-machine hybrid creative agency.”

Backed by artificial intelligence and machine learning, the company promises to bring clients smarter, faster and more effective creative advertising. 

“It was really clear to us that the solution to the problem, as it has been in industry after industry, was technology,” said Barrett, the chief strategy officer. “We needed to take a radically new approach of the application of technology to the problem of creativity, so we are building machines that humans can use in order to make better advertising faster. If you think of advertising like building a house, you can build a house with hand tools or you can build it with power tools. What we're trying to do is build the power tools. We're still building a house, we're just doing it in a much faster, much more efficient way.”

While many agencies tout their artificial intelligence or machine learning capabilities, the founders of Supernatural believe their offering is different because it serves as the agency’s nucleus.

“So many agencies say they have some kind of version of this, but what they’re talking about is an AI algorithm that tests ads after they are already out, or an AI copywriting thing,” Caiozzo said. “The entire agency, every single person, collaborates with the platform we’re building — before the ads are made, not after. It helps make smarter decisions prior to the ad being created, during its creation and also while it’s running in order to optimize. The short of it is, we can get to strategies very, very fast — at the fraction of the time as another agency.”

For example, Supernatural was involved in a strategy pitch for its client Vita Coco's new brand, Pwr Lift protein water.

“The initial hypothesis going in was you’re going to be dealing with meatheads,” Barrett said.

But after the team turned to what it informally calls “the machine” for insight, “it quickly returned this weird world of weightlifters that was crossing with anime, strange memes and this culture of nerdiness,” Caiozzo said. “So we made our entirety strategy around those connections that I feel like in a million years, you would never have convinced the client on without the data. It revealed this huge white space in talking to weightlifters in a different way.” 

The agency arrived at the strategy in two days — with two weeks left in the pitch. 

Outside of Vita Coco, the agency’s current client list includes YouTube, Sir Kensington's and Kayak. Over the summer, Supernatural created for Kayak work centered on people's desires to travel once again, post-pandemic, and it ultimately resonated with the brand's target audience.

"Supernatural’s brand creative met the moment and was a big contributor to the business over the summer,” Matt Clarke, VP of North America marketing at Kayak, said in a statement.

The platform the Supernatural founders created is built on 50 years of information on what makes advertising effective, informed by data tied to clients’ specific challenges and goals — a “data and technology stack that I would put up against the data and technology stack of any holding company or any consulting firm,” Barrett said.

But with all that data muscle, where do the people fit in? 

Returning to the house-building metaphor, “The thing that the tools don’t do is assemble the story, and the way humans absorb information is in a story,” Barrett explained. “The tools can tell you what and in a lot of cases they can tell you why, but what they can’t do is explain, and they can’t set objectives. That is the fundamental limitation of all A.I. and machine learning.”

The Humans

The founding trio brings a diverse skill set to the new company. Before Interesting Development, Caiozzo created and led memorable work such as Burger King's "Whopper Freakout," Comcast's "Emily's Oz" and campaigns for Help Remedies out of agencies including Goodby Silverstein & Partners, CPB and 215 McCann. CEO Elder and Chief Strategy Officer Barrett deliver the data and tech muscle — Elder started the digital department at Goodby, founded Heat advertising and served as managing director at Deloitte Consulting, while Barrett was president of Heat, principal of Deloitte and also ran strategy, research and analytics for Universal McCann in North America.

The Supernatural leadership team also includes Executive Creative Director Rajeev Basu, former global creative director at Spotify and Wieden+Kennedy New York vet. A former Ad Age “Creative You Should Know,” Basu originally trained in statistics and economics, but ultimately ended up in the creative world and is known for his playful tech-driven work. While at Spotify, he was behind notable campaigns such as the job posting directed to outgoing President Barack Obama as well as an ad deemed too scary to run in the U.K.

​​”Wherever you go, brand side or agency side, everyone is forever asking for more in less time,” Basu said. “Supernatural is one of the few places that is using technology to solve that, and give back more time to creatives to do their thing. That makes this a fun place to be.”

There’s also Head of Strategy Ashley Williams, who led media strategy at WPP for Sunday Night Football, the Olympics, NBC News and MSNBC; and Managing Director Melissa Hill, who previously served in that same post at Mekanism and before that, was client services lead on Playstation at BBH.

What’s in a name

In coming up with the shop’s moniker, Caiozzo said “Supernatural” is meant to invoke the idea of an “otherworldly power that people don’t quite understand. We look at ‘the machine’ as giving that power to people, but we wanted to make sure that our tone was not like a tech company taking itself so seriously to the point of it being offensive. So we wanted it to be fun and funny and noticeable and not quiet, like an ad agency should be.”

At Supernatural, the founders believe “you don’t have to make a compromise between really good technology, AI and machine learning—and really good creativity,” Barrett said. 

If the company succeeds, it may hold the blueprint for the industry going forward. “I was pretty ready to be done and had basically said, this job is not doable anymore,” Caiozzo said. Now, “we can move fast, and that greatly impacts highly creative people who were feeling trapped before. We need to embrace the data and the technology at a very real level and free the creatives up so that they can go back to doing what they’re actually good at.”

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