When I first talked with Rob White, for an article I was writing for DeltaSky magazine on the Twin Cities marketing-creative community (see page 122 on this link), he was hesitant to call the Uptown Minneapolis company he cofounded, Zeus Jones, an advertising agency.
Rob’s had a long career in the ad business, including the president’s job at Fallon. He helped develop many award-winning campaigns for notable brands. He’s an ad guy, right? So what should I call this beast, Rob? He threw out a number of possibilities, then just laughed.
If you can think of a term that mashes up marketing, graphic design, interactive, business strategy, and a soupcon of media strategy, let us both know. Whatever you call it, it’s innovative—though Rob and his partners would claim that the innovation is driven primarily by clients looking for new ways to reach people.
Rob, along with fellow former Fallon fellas Adrian Ho, Christian Erickson, and Eric Frost, opened Zeus Jones in March 2007. They had dug the creative energy at Fallon, but they were finding themselves wanting to try some new ideas that didn’t fit Fallon’s more traditional style.
“The marketing world is so cluttered, it’s so difficult to get people’s attention,” Adrian notes. Fast-evolving interactive technology was revealing tantalizing new creative possibilities. Marketers are certainly putting “trad-ad” messages online, and this isn’t to say they don’t work. But the interactive world can also swiftly undercut those messages via brand critics, marketing-BS detectors, and unhappy, often video-posting customers.
The result: “The picture of a company is being formed much less by advertising,” Adrian says. That image, he and his colleagues believe, is being shaped much more by how a company acts—how it helps people, not the clever ways it shouts at the consumer masses.
Rob, Adrian, and company see a distinction between “traditional brands,” which rely primarily on good ol’ mass-marketing techniques; and “modern brands, which realize that those techniques were less and less able (at least by themselves) to drive real growth and loyalty.
These moderns are generally newer firms like JetBlue, Zappos, Netflix, and (of course) Google. The way Zeus Jones sees it, these brands’ entire approach to business is different. Marketing isn’t just tactical to sales—it follows from what they can actually deliver. Zeus Jones calls it “operations as marketing.” (Some examples of that here.)
Says Rob: “We’ve reached an inflection point where marketing can help business.” Not as a fun-loving sidekick, but as a strategic collaborator. Sitting at the adults’ table.
So what does Zeus Jones do? To get an idea, take a gander at its work. In particular, check out its projects for Nordstrom, especially the “Recent Work” on the right on the page. It’s not a breaking RSS feed to note that the mainline department-store business hasn’t been great this past decade or so. But Nordstrom and Zeus Jones have been creating some visually compelling ways to refresh the business model and business strategy for an interactive age—with the focus squarely on service.
Whatever this is, it’s not traditional consumer marketing. (In fact, it’s past time to declare the term “consumer” disgustingly dead.) And whatever it is, Zeus Jones’s clients seem to like it. From a handful of people working at a single long table in a small Uptown office, Zeus Jones will soon be moving into larger quarters nearby.
It’s one of the top new-style marketing companies in town worth following.
BTW I: There is a Jones at Zeus Jones, but Sarah Jones’s hiring was, Rob White says, a complete coincidence. No Zeus there, though. Rob, a native of Scotland, half-claims the company’s name emerged from a group haze induced by single-malt whisky. Perhaps more believably, it’s a Google-friendly name with the etymology the partners thought appropriate to the firm: Zeus = powerful, creative; Jones = buttoned down businessman.)
BTW II: Speaking of Uptown marketing companies: Dig the new HQ for another local up-and-coming shop, Mono.
I’m posting fresh BTW every Thursday; tweeting most business days at @generebeck.
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