“One thing we did in naming the agency Mischief is it tends to attract the kind of people who want a certain kind of work,” says Greg Hahn, co-founder and chief creative officer of Mischief @ No Fixed Address. “You go to an initialed agency for something that feels safe or expected.”

See all of Ad Age's 2021 Small Agency Award winners here.

That’s the answer Hahn gives for how the startup, born in the pandemic and already counting the likes of Kraft, Molson Coors and Pfizer as clients, will approach its second year in business. Taking on the “wrong kind of clients” can steer small agencies wrong, he says, but Mischief aims to maintain the purity of its creativity.

That creativity has seen it consistently come up with provocative and unexpected campaigns, whether that’s persuading Kraft Mac & Cheese to run a campaign encouraging people to “send noods,” hijacking Capri Sun and replacing it with water in Chicago schools, creating unnerving deepfakes of Kim Jong-un and Putin for not-for-profit RepresentUs or celebrating registered voters as “VILFs” in an election-timed push for OKCupid.

Its creative accolades have been matched in business success; Mischief pulled in income of $4 million during its first six months of operation. Mischief projects that by the close of 2021 it will have grown its income by a factor of 70 since its opening.

Its success rose from the ashes of pandemic jitters: The agency was founded after Hahn, the former chief creative officer of BBDO, lost his job early in the COVID-19 crisis and hooked up with independent Canadian agency No Fixed Address (NFA), which in turn was looking for a way into the U.S. market. They assembled the team, bringing in former MullenLowe Senior VP and Group Account Director Kerry McKibbin as president and recruiting BBDO’s Bianca Guimaraes and Kevin Mulroy as executive creative directors, at “super warp speed,” recalls NFA’s Co-Founder Dave Lafond. “We all had a similar mindset; we wanted to push boundaries.”

At the agency’s heart is small agency culture; Hahn wanted to get away from the fear that dominates in big agencies, and always ask “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”

This has sometimes included being provocative, as with Kraft Mac & Cheese. Encouraging people to send a box of noodles to their loved ones but with a nod to sexting (“send noods”) was edgy for a family-focused brand, but to compete with Cheetos’ mac-and-cheese offering, Kraft Heinz needed to target a Gen Z demographic. The campaign, which played off the word “nudes,” featuring pixelated images of Mac & Cheese, attracted some controversy on social media but ultimately hype won out; the effort shifted 24,000 Mac & Cheese kits and garnered more than 26,000 social mentions, more than double that of the Cheetos launch.

Mischief’s work for RepresentUs, a bipartisan organization dedicated to fighting political corruption, was daring in a more terrifying way. It created videos in which deepfakes of Kim Jong-un and Putin directly addressed the American public, thanking them for doing the job of destabilizing the country for them. The networks pulled the TV buy, but the videos went viral on social media, endorsed by the likes of Monica Lewinsky and Michael Douglas, and the campaign resulted in a 150% increase in email signups for RepresentUs and a 250% boost to its website traffic. "Mischief brought so many amazing ideas to the table it was hard to choose,” says Joshua Graham Lynn, co-founder and CEO at RepresentUs.

Not all Mischief’s campaigns are “mischievous” in a daring sense; some are merely unexpected for the category. For example, its COVID-19 vaccine confidence campaign, created for Pfizer along with BioNTech and a consortium of medical organizations, took an emotive approach to a normally dry medical category. Instead of taking what Hahn describes as a “dated” scientific approach, Mischief decided to be more “compelling” with ads highlighting intimate interactions between family members and friends that would have been completely normal before the pandemic.

Hahn says that in terms of pushing the category, it’s one of the agency’s bravest efforts. However, he characterizes “risk” as a subjective term: “My definition of risky would be work you pay a lot of money for, but nobody remembers.”

And in terms of the appetite of clients to be brave, McKibbin believes that the pandemic has helped: “A good thing about now is that there is a huge impact on marketing bottom lines so marketers are willing to try new things.”

All of this work was created with the agency working 100% remotely; many of the team did not even meet in real life until recently. But that paid off for its creativity-focused approach, says Hahn. “I think the pandemic for agencies and clients has all been about the work and the people and that is by far where we excel,” says Hahn. “Clients aren’t judging agencies by the size of their lobby.”

Nor did social distance affect the team’s creative chemistry; Hahn says the sense of “new adventure and everyone building it from the ground up” has enabled them to create a cohesive agency culture, even remotely. “We’re ‘with’ each other all the time and focused on the same goals,” adds McKibbin. “I feel closer to some of these people I haven’t met to some of my other friends.”

Mischief does, however, plan to open a physical office in New York in the fall, at first operating a hybrid model. Hahn promises it will have “more of a clubhouse vibe,” enabling people “to throw ideas around serendipitously without having to set up a meeting.”

Now 40-strong, Mischief hopes to grow its talent, with a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. Lafond says it invests 70%-80% of its revenue into talent, which is more than is typical in big agencies. “We give ourselves permission to go with people who work right for us.”

The emphasis is on finding “people not roles,” adds McKibbin. “Our aim is to focus on great talent, hire people first and do great work—and the rest will follow.”

See all of Ad Age's 2021 Small Agency Award winners here.