Founded with the philosophy that brands need to take action to get results, WorkInProgress was something of an action hero in 2021. The Boulder, Colorado-based small agency helped Domino’s Pizza fight back against delivery aggregators eating away at the company’s share and its customers' budgets, while onboarding a new client, Mark Anthony Brands’ Mike’s, and marketing it to breakout success in the burgeoning but crowded hard-seltzer category.

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In both cases, WorkInProgress cut through highly commoditized industries to demonstrate passion on behalf of its clients. It’s an approach that has served the agency well since it was founded in 2016 by seven partners from Domino’s former agency, CP&B, famous for their work in having rescued the pizza chain with a daringly honest confrontation with the quality of its pizza and service.

Work for Domino’s in 2021 revolved around reckoning with the dynamics of a food service industry upended by delivery-as-a-service providers like DoorDash, GrubHub and Uber Eats.

“For a long time the competitive set for Domino’s was Pizza Hut, Papa John’s and Little Caesars, but the reality today is the competitive set are the aggregators,” said Matt Talbot, partner and chief creative officer, WorkInProgress. “We looked at it, and we didn’t like how they were treating consumers or the restaurants they serviced.”

Domino’s took two actions here: For customers finding themselves upcharged for delivery, Domino’s dropped off random gifts and discounts along with its pizzas. The 22-week campaign, cheekily tagged Surprise Frees, totaled some $50 million in giveaways while highlighting a service drawback virtually every restaurant in the country had except for Domino’s. WorkInProgress then turned its attention to those rivals, rewarding customers in select markets with gift cards good toward discounts at neighboring rival restaurants whose bottom lines suffer as aggregators take their cut.

WorkInProgress essentially doubled in size last year, taking over the Mike’s Hard Lemonade creative account from Havas, growing from about 25 to 50 employees and seeing annual revenue soar by 275%.

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The first order of business for Mike’s was getting the malt-based beverage brand into the red-hot hard seltzer field, launching a Hard Lemonade Seltzer product behind a high-visibility campaign that starred former boxer Mike Tyson. His punches landed, with 2.1 billion earned and paid impressions, a 6% increase in consumer purchase intent and the brand bypassing its two largest rivals to become the category’s leading alcoholic lemon seltzer, Talbot said.