Brands looking to ramp up their social media marketing will often approach an agency with the ill-informed request to “make them go viral.” 

For Day One Agency, though, social media success isn’t about manufacturing a fleeting viral moment, but pushing out a steady drip of engaging social content and infusing a celebration of the brand’s community into its online campaigns. That’s the foundational strategy the shop has leveraged to build thriving online communities for clients such as Chipotle, Converse and Nike. 

The agency’s more than 50 full-time Gen Z employees—one-third of its workforce—is a crucial element of Day One’s ability to keep on top of the internet’s subcultures and rapid trend cycles. That allows it to offer direct, up-to-the-minute insights into the young consumers that the majority of its clients are courting. 

“We know [social media] is going to be more crowded and louder than ever as the world continues to evolve, and there’s just more [content],” said Jamie Falkowski, chief creative officer and partner at the independent creative agency. “Having the ability to find stuff that feels real and human and comes from real voices is getting more and more important.”

That Gen Z throughline and seamless production of attention-grabbing social content has kept clients such as Chipotle, which the agency has partnered with for seven years, on Day One Agency’s roster for the majority of its 10-year lifespan. And with brands setting aside increasingly large portions of their overall marketing budgets for social media and influencers, Day One also won a surge of new clients over the past 12 months, including e.l.f. Beauty, Lyft, Amazon and mental health app Calm. 

New business accounted for nearly $4 million of the agency’s nearly $42.6 million in fee revenue between October 2022 and September 2023. Day One projected its revenue would be up 10% to $47.3 million in 2023.

The agency scored most of those new clients through referrals from existing clients rather than new business pitches, said Josh Rosenberg, the agency’s co-founder and CEO. Chipotle, for example, introduced the shop to e.l.f. Beauty, while some of its former clients at Meta connected the agency to Lyft and Calm.

With its Los Angeles production studio, Day One Studios, the agency last year produced over 900 photo assets, more than 550 short-form videos and nearly two dozen pieces of long-form content for clients including Nike and spirits company Beam Suntory. The studio, which the agency launched in February 2022 to meet brands’ growing demand for real-time social content, has collectively generated the agency more than $10 million in revenue.  

Day One also re-established its youth insights arm, AskGenZ.com, last year, allowing its clients to submit questions such as “What does Gen Z think about diversity in the TV industry?” or “Does Gen Z like TikTok more than Instagram?” and receive a series of responses from the agency’s community of Gen Zers within 24 hours. 

And at the agency’s weekly Monday “writers room” pitch meeting, modeled after those of late-night comedy shows such as “Saturday Night Live,” employees come together to turn creators or trends popping up on their TikTok For You pages into actionable ideas for clients. One of those meetings, for instance, birthed a bizarrely funny video of one of the agency’s Los Angeles employees dropping a pair of Converse on his head, causing his voice to transform into the sound of sneakers squeaking against a floor, Falkowski said. 

Connecting to culture 

Building on its relationship with Chipotle as the restaurant chain’s “culture agency,” Day One transformed a viral TikTok menu hack into a long-term shift in Chipotle’s business model. The brand’s “From TikTok to Table” campaign brought the “Fajita Quesadilla” custom order popularized on TikTok by food critics Keith Lee and Alexis Frost to the restaurant’s menu, which has since doubled Chipotle’s quesadilla business. The campaign received more than 34 million impressions across social media and 4.5 billion media impressions. 

“It’s amazing to me how many people have taken action as a result of their posts,” said Chris Brandt, chief marketing officer at Chipotle. “I think we handled things the right way. If we waited six months for the Fajita Quesadilla to be available in our app, we would have lost all momentum. But we were able to turn the trend around very quickly—literally within just a couple of months.” 

Day One similarly looked to Chipotle’s TikTok community—more specifically, their habit of grabbing large stacks of napkins for their takeout orders and eating those orders in their cars—to create a limited-edition napkin dispenser that clips onto a car’s sun visor. The agency sourced that idea—which also inspired a TikTok of a “Chipotle Napkin” mock Halloween costume—directly from the comments sections of their videos, Falkowski said. 

Some of these ideas are spawned by the agency’s “insights bank,” in which the team compiles what Falkowski calls “real consumer truths” expressed in social media comments—“especially when you see a lot of people commenting on and liking somebody else’s comment”—into a spreadsheet the agency can use to inform future campaigns and posts.

Day One Agency also looks to Converse’s online community to inform its TikTok content for the brand, Falkowski said. “And there are so many different types of Converse fans [on TikTok], so we try to make and collaborate on content that kind of reaches all those different niches.” 

For example, the agency teamed up with Gen-Z-favorite rapper and record producer Tyler the Creator for a TikTok interview series called “Sizing Up,” a nod to a brand community in-joke about the sizing of Converse’s sneakers often differing from most other footwear brands. The agency filmed that series, along with a slew of other TikTok videos, at the rapper’s annual “Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival” music festival (of which Converse is a sponsor). 

Day One also sponsored roughly a dozen creators, including Brazilian streetwear influencer Thayne Oliveira and Polish fashion creator Amelia Matyjasek, to help promote the launch of Converse’s new “Cruise” sneakers by blending them into their unique personal styles. That campaign collectively amassed more than 60 million views and drove nearly 30,000 link clicks. 

Cultivating new communities 

Day One Agency kicked off its partnership with new client e.l.f. Beauty by spearheading a social media push to promote the launch of the brand’s “Suntouchable” sunscreens last summer, recruiting “Jersey Shore” star Snooki, famous for her excessive tanning, to be the face of the campaign. Snooki starred in a pair of satirical, 1990s-inspired PSA videos emphasizing the importance of SPF protection by calling the sun a “two-faced bitch” and urging viewers to “please tan responsibly,” and also supplied a bank of pre-recorded replies for a helpline consumers could call for sun protection advice.

The campaign, designed to appeal to Gen Z nostalgia, accumulated nearly 9 million views and over 240,000 total engagements and helped drive a 14% week-over-week boost in sales of e.l.f.’s Suntouchable collection. 

The agency also led a major social campaign for new client Lyft tied to the rollout of the rideshare app’s “Women+ Connect” feature, which female and nonbinary drivers can toggle on to match them to female or nonbinary riders, and vice versa. Day One tapped a group of influencers across TikTok and Instagram whose content revolves around highlighting good news to raise awareness of the new feature and produced a flurry of videos for Lyft’s social channels.

Those combined efforts garnered 31 million total views, and the social content the agency created for the campaign collected nearly 80,000 engagements overall.