In 2021, the five-year-old Joan agency nurtured longer-term partnerships and sharpened its focus on making long-standing brands trendy.

See all of Ad Age's A-List 2022 winners here.

Although COVID brought challenges (after expecting a profitable 2020, the agency found itself instead struggling just to not lay anyone off—which it didn’t), the agency's time away from the office allowed it to consider how to develop long-term brand relationships and reflect on its approach to modernizing legacy brands.

So, in the later stages of the pandemic, when brands began to question what the future would look like for them, “we were ready to answer those questions," said Jaime Robinson, co-founder and chief creative officer.

The agency focused on developing its modern legends "growth wheel" process, a system involving a circle divided into 10 segments, five of which look at how to sustain long-term growth, while the other five include making the brand culturally relevant. This led to a “business transformation,” said Co-Founder and CEO Lisa Clunie, and the agency now has relationships with brands including eBay, Dr. Scholl’s, H&M, S&P Global, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Google.

The shop hasn’t shied away from serious topics, including mental health struggles and climate change, the latter which included an ad for Science Moms and the Potential Energy Coalition that posited: “If an entire city’s worth of plumbers told you not to use paper towels if you run out of TP, would you keep flushing?” 

 “What our audience needs is levity,” said Robinson, even in serious discussions. An ad for Facebook during Mental Health Awareness Month highlighted the ways in which people came together around mental health during the pandemic. 

See all of Ad Age's A-List 2022 winners here.

When it comes to the company’s diversity, the agency acknowledges that there will never be an endpoint. Joan reported in its A-List entry that 35% of its employees are BIPOC and 10% of employees identify as LGBTQIA+, and it has since hired eight employees, half of whom identify as LGBTQIA+.