Call it customer relationship management, performance marketing or data-driven marketing. By whatever name, Stagwell Group’s Gale has thrived in a fast-growing if often unglamorous realm of the agency world since its founding eight years ago.

Recent years, however, have seen an explosion not only in Gale’s business but also in its scope of work. Stagwell’s fastest-growing agency more than doubled revenue last year to $130 million, its second consecutive year of doubling revenue growth. Much of that comes from expanding to handle broader media, creative and consulting assignments for existing clients.

Often, clients turn to Gale for one of what the agency calls its “superpowers”—which include advisory, story, CRM, media and data and technology—then expand into other services. Last year, 90% of revenue came from clients using two or more services. Of 20 new business wins in 2022, eight covered multiple duties ranging from creative to enterprise technology consulting.

“We spent five years building the foundation of an agency that we knew was going to be integrated, but we wanted to build correctly because we were building it from scratch,” said CEO Brad Simms. “We have been purposely putting the pieces together for what we view as a modern business agency over the last eight years, and I think that what is happening now is there are enough CMOs and CEOs who realize the benefit of a smaller set of partners that they can place real business problems with and hold accountable.”

Building Block

A case in point is H&R Block, which appointed Gale in 2021 to handle media, data and CRM, but has since expanded its scope to cover business consulting and creative services, said Sophia Zhang, Gale managing director.

“One of the most frequent quotes I hear from clients is that they didn’t realize they needed an agency like Gale until they met Gale,” Zhang said. After talking with Block CEO Jeff Jones and CMO Jill Cress, “we realized they actually have fundamental business challenges because they’re trying to move away from a traditional tax preparation company to a small-business services and fintech company,” Zhang said.

Gale has since helped H&R Block do just that, and is currently working on a 10-year strategic plan, she said. Creative storytelling is part of that remit now. Recently, that included working with Gannett’s USA Today to create an interactive map showing areas with disproportionate concentrations of small businesses that aren’t getting products and services they need to help guide them toward Block services, Zhang said.

Gale has become integral to H&R Block’s success, Cress said in a statement. “Gale has continued to impress the team in their ability to address complex business problems, drive growth for Block’s strategic imperatives and leverage data and insights to realize our vision,” she said. “They push us to think differently and to be bold while inspiring how we think about partnerships across the media landscape.”

Buy your ticket for the Ad Age A-List & Creativity Awards Gala here.

Integration and speed

Winston Binch, Gale’s chief brand and experience officer, said the agency’s integration reminds him of his days at Crispin Porter & Bogusky working on Burger King and other accounts. Having creative and media integrated there made a difference, and he sees the same thing with Gale.

“In addition to driving creative innovation, it allows us to move at a pace you need to move today,” Binch said.

Simms points to a recent International Women’s Day activation planned two weeks before the event and a multi-month media plan developed in 48 hours based on new opportunities that arose. “That’s the speed you can operate at because you’re integrated and don’t need to call a meeting to get all the agencies around and debate it,” he said.

Gale also tries to eliminate friction among its nine offices by not having them compete, instead favoring “centers of excellence,” including data science in Toronto, design and integrated creative in Los Angeles, a media accelerator in Denver and an enterprise technology and media operations hub in Bangalore, India. “Something like 82% of our clients have multi-office teams,” Simms said.

Performance with reach

Gale’s roots in CRM would seem to create a bias toward plans aimed at getting more from existing brand customers.  And sometimes that does lead Gale to focus on better ways to find a brand’s core customers. For Old Dominion Freight Lines, that meant shifting from Major League Baseball sponsorships, on which the transportation brand was focused before Gale got the account in 2019, toward college football, where its research found more of its logistics customers—from Walmart executives to small businesses—were spending their time.

But one thing that stands out across the agency’s work is how often its analytics are used to develop “propensity models” that expand brands’ customer bases.

Besides fostering Block’s move into small business services, Gale has helped the Chipotle Rewards loyalty program more than triple membership since 2019 from 8 million to 28 million by focusing on acquiring and engaging more customers. For Wells Enterprises’ Bomb Pop, an old if iconic brand, Gale reached out to a younger audience by partnering with seven TikTok creators for a Fourth of July "#AFlavorForEveryYou" challenge that resulted in 37.4 million impressions, more than 40,000 videos and a 30% increase in summer sales for the brand’s best season ever. And for premium window brand Pella, Gale created a plan to reach out to lower-income households with a local TV, radio, print and out-of-home campaign for target ZIP codes that decreased media spending by 18% but drove 11% sales growth.

Media growth

A Gale media practice that didn’t exist three years ago today handles almost $1 billion in billings, including Dropbox, which recently appointed Gale as its global media agency of record.

Nearing $1 billion in media billings is an interesting milestone, but Simms acknowledges it pales alongside the billions of dollars big holding company media shops handle. However, he’s also watching bigger media shops moving in Gale’s direction even as Gale moves in on their business.

With its roots in data and analytics, Gale has long experience building custom media buying and planning algorithms. So Simms sees growing talk by bigger media agencies about advanced analytics and building custom algorithms for clients as old hat. And increasingly its analytics lead it toward spending in traditional media and premium inventory.

To highlight the diversity of its media offering, Simms points to a spot Gale bought for Merck’s Nasonex in the first postgame slot after the Super Bowl in February; permanent out-of-home placements for MilkPep (the industry’s Producer Education Program) in addition to social (TikTok and Meta); and retail media buys across multiple clients.

Its buying may be driven by analytics, but it’s not necessarily programmatic or focused on driving down CPMs.

“We are buying premium media because our media buying is driven by storytelling, and not any principal positions that we’re taking or the cheapest remnant inventory,” Simms said. “We often hear from publishers that, ‘For your spend, Gale, you buy an extraordinary percentage of premium media.’”

See all the winners of Ad Age's 2023 A-List Awards here.