Evan Starkman, a former TV personality, noticed a disconnect between brand and consumer while emceeing an experiential activation for Miller Genuine Draft. He founded The Bait Shoppe soon after (and later won Miller Genuine Draft). In the years since, the agency has used its scrappy, outsider mentality to tackle experiential marketing in remarkable ways, including becoming what it says is the first North American agency to become carbon neutral, launching in-house fabrication agency Time and Space Scenic and sibling communications agency Famous Last Words.
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In 2018, beer brand Natural Light launched an initiative to contribute $1 million a year over 10 years to help students burdened by loan debt, but wanted to re-energize the project last year when America’s student loan crisis became a larger national conversation. Natural Light tapped The Bait Shoppe, which in 2020 started renting graduates’ diplomas for $100 each in debt relief to create the world’s most expensive work of art: “The Da Vinci of Debt.” The piece filled New York’s Grand Central Terminal with 2,641 diplomas suspended from the ceiling in a vortex of paper, proclaiming the price of each degree valued the sculpture at $470 million. The campaign went viral, collecting over 58 million impressions on social media.
The Bait Shoppe is also responsible for T-Mobile’s most successful launch in company history, with a quarantine scavenger hunt. After the company was forced to cancel its traditional, conference-style phone launch with OnePlus, The Bait Shoppe studied the map of T-Mobile’s 5G coverage to install OnePlus stores in unlikely places, like an island off the coast of Georgia or a mountaintop in Montana. On social, the cellular company dropped clues to tease shops’ locations, which followers could guess to win prizes. The campaign’s site received 1,900 visits per minute for seven days straight.
