The Cartwheel & Co. crew. Top row: Ashleigh Powers, Rob Drury and Ashley Blankier. Center: Emily Johnston, Maggie Hightower and Alex Stein. Bottom: Jess Kantarian, Jennifer Staikos and Mark Dalhausser.
“Where there’s turmoil and uncertainty, there’s always a kind of opportunity,” said Rob Drury, CEO of Cartwheel and Co. Marketing, an experiential marketing agency that sprung from the ashes of the pandemic in 2021.
From $7,500 in start-up costs, Cartwheel and its lean staff of nine generated $6.28 million in revenue in 2022, executing real-life events for clients including Amazon Prime, NBCUniversal and Starz.
While the pandemic created havoc for experiential marketing firms—including the one Drury worked at for 19 years—the Great Resignation and rise in gig work showed a new way forward, Drury said. In-person events, he was convinced, would eventually make their way back.
“I think in a lot of ways, the conditions for starting an agency were strong,” said Drury. “There was less I was walking away from. It was kind of like, a roll of the dice might not be the worst thing right now, because this other scenario isn’t working out the way it should be. I remember thinking at the time that [the experiential marketing industry] is not good now. But I felt very, very confident that events were going to bounce back.”
Drury crafted Cartwheel to minimize the pitfalls of what he called “top-heavy and slow” agencies that tended to chase revenue goals and take on less profitable projects than they should. Cartwheel is fully remote, and scaled quickly by capitalizing on the glut of freelancers to execute marketing programs with oversight from the team. This “accordion team,” Drury said, offers the scale of a mid-sized agency without committing to dozens of employees.
“Because of our size, we have taken it to a bit of an extreme, but I think every experiential agency is doing some version of what we’re doing today,” Drury said.
Cartwheel’s projects in 2022 included an Emmy nomination drive for Amazon Prime. One element was a fan experience event that created a replica of 1960 New York depicted in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”—in Los Angeles. Partnerships with quintessential New York brands such as Russ & Daughters bagel shop and The Blue Note jazz club brought true authenticity.
Immersive fan experience for Maisel that replicated NYC from 1960 in the middle of LA and brought the best of New York City directly to Los Angelinos
“The project combined a lot of things that I think we do well,” Drury said. “We are primarily an experience agency, but I’d say the second thing we do are partnerships. And I think the partnership piece is really exciting. I personally think it’s going to be the fastest-growing discipline in marketing in general: Two brands come together, no one spends a lot of money, and they share their cultural cachet, they share the audience and they share the channels to reach that audience. They create something where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
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Another partnership Cartwheel was behind connected the horror doll “Chucky” from the SiFi Network and USA Network to a special beer from Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Elysian Brewing brand. Chucky’s Killer Wit Beer included custom tap handles, branded coasters, napkins and collateral at bars; custom content videos for AB InBev and NBCU social handles; and a creepy Chucky AR filter for user-generated content.
An online tasting was held for 26 press and influencers (with a surprise appearance from Chucky). The brew also made an appearance at beer festivals, and a national PR campaign targeted pop culture and lifestyle publications.
