For Gut, 2022 was a year of extraordinary growth and firsts. The independent agency, founded in 2018, opened its sixth office, hired its first CEO and grew revenue 40%. Seven new clients represented four first-time categories for the agency.

The global-minded shop added a Los Angeles office to locations in Miami, Buenos Aires, São Paolo, Mexico City and Toronto. Gut will also open its seventh office—the first in Europe—in the coming weeks. The agency also expanded its revenue streams with the launch of a new strategy consultancy as well as The Content Department, a service for social and culturally reactive content, in its Miami headquarters.

Newly overseeing it all is the agency’s first global CEO, Andrea Diquez. Previously serving as CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi New York and DDB Chicago, Diquez said she had been in talks with Gut Co-Founders and Creative Chairmen Anselmo Ramos and Gaston Bigio for years before timelines aligned to bring her on with the agency in November.

Ramos told Ad Age the agency had been seeking a CEO for about two years but found the task of identifying a candidate “fluent in both creativity and business” difficult before Bigio suggested Diquez, with whom he’d worked decades prior during overlapping tenures at Saatchi & Saatchi. The deal was sealed when Ramos’ wife cooked a Brazilian dinner for Diquez. The global CEO described the dinner as a delicious mixture of different flavors—“what Gut is in a dish.”

Diquez describes her new role as different from any she’s held, “where you have to be proactive in looking for clients all day long,” she said. “Here, they just come because of who we are.”

Bigio added that in a year with “all kinds of uncertainties—global, regional, personnel,” Gut was winning accounts, hiring new talent and winning awards—including its second Grand Prix and second place for Independent Network of the Year at the Cannes Lions.

“We truly believe that if we put out good work, the good work will pay off everything that we do," said Bigio.

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The agency will have its work cut out for it this year in replacing Popeyes, one of its signature clients. Under a new chief marketing officer, the client has called a creative review, parting ways with Gut after three years. 

“We have achieved many milestones with Popeyes, and we’re grateful for all of the campaigns and projects we’ve created with the brand,” Gut said in a statement after the loss in late February. “We’re looking forward to continuing our work with all of our other clients and for the many opportunities that lie ahead for us in 2023.”

'Real Tone'

Gut’s Grand Prix-winning work was for Google, one of three wins in 2022 that made up Gut’s first work in the tech category. The “Real Tone” campaign debuted during the Super Bowl, the agency’s first Big Game spot, and became one of the year’s most lauded pieces of creative.

The ad promoted new camera tech in Google’s latest Pixel phone that more accurately captures the color of non-white skin than cameras historically have. The 60-second spot, set to the previously unreleased Lizzo track “If You Love Me,” shows a montage of photos that richly depict a range of skin tones across a spectrum of races, ethnicities and ages, taken on Google Pixel 6.

According to the agency, the Google Store saw traffic increase four times on Super Bowl Sunday, and searches for the specific device jumped 86 times after the initial airing.

The campaign "was a great way of taking the brief and actually creatively transforming that brief,” said Diquez, commending the spot for not just promoting a product but connecting it to current movements in equity and inclusion. “I was pretty jealous at Cannes when I saw that," she said of the commercial, created before she joined Gut.

Diversity has always been a core tenet of Gut, which aims to be “the most diverse, creative independent agency network ever,” according to its A-List entry. Across Gut’s two U.S. offices, 20 nationalities are represented among its employees—76% are minorities, 21% identify as people of color and more than half identify as female. In addition, Gut has an internal task force, Committed, that works to amplify diversity across its network, works with an external DEI consultancy and supports the One School program, which has brought six full-time employees to Gut.

The bravery scale

Gut has implemented a bravery scale for its clients, where they can rate their own guts from one to 10, which the agency will use to get them to top-tier courage.

“We’re a brave agency for brave clients,” said Ramos. “Bravery is not binary—bravery is a daily choice, a very conscious choice and is a journey and a commitment. But we can help clients learn how to be braver and move up on the scale.”

One brave client is Philadelphia Cream Cheese, which selected Gut as its creative agency of record in 2019. After a supply chain shortage kept the brand from shelves in 2021 during the critical holiday baking season, it wanted to make a loud comeback in 2022.

Building on a social media trend in which viewers are fooled by a knife slicing through hyper-realistic cake sculptures of everyday objects, Gut created an expansive holiday campaign inclusive of out-of-home, print, digital, social and a hero film to show off the creations in action.

Gut recruited JohnnyCakes, star of Netflix’s “Is It Cake?”, to craft a luxury handbag made from cheesecake. The creations were then made into do-it-yourself kits on Amazon. The handbag and camera kits sold out—reaching No. 6 on Amazon’s trending products list. Overall, the campaign delivered more than 300 million social impressions for Philadelphia Cream Cheese and raised the brand’s holiday sales 33% year-over-year, doubling its predicted annual sales growth rate.

“This is not just advertising,” said Bigio, reflecting on Gut’s 2022 work broadly. The year was the first step in the next phase of Gut, which is to “try to do what we do very well, and at the same time try to figure out if we can make this world a better world or not. And you see how much clients value that and how much people value that and then you understand—it’s not idealism, it’s just doing the right thing.”

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