AGENCY OF THE YEAR
11-75 EMPLOYEES
GOLD
Mekanism
Mixing crafty social-media distribution and creativity
earns San Francisco shop a cult following
■ BY KUNUR PATEL kpatel@adage.com
GET A PRODUCER, director, tech-head
and animator together in adland and
what do you get? An agency band that
makes beautiful music.
“We’re more like the Ramones;
we’re not as talented as the Beatles,”
said Jason Harris, president-executive
producer at Mekanism.
But it’s Mekanism’s work rather
than the band that amasses the cult
following. Partners Tommy Means,
founder and creative director; Pete
Caban, CEO-head of digital; Ian
Kovalic, creative director; and Mr.
Harris are the four-corners of
Mekanism, a San Francisco-based
agency that’s evolved from digital-production shop to a creative shop
that makes content that millions of
people on the internet read, watch and
share.
Mekanism has carved out a spot
making stories that spread by layering
social-media distribution on top of its
creative rep. Once the 61-person
makes something beautiful or, more
likely, edgy or funny, it’s figured out
how to distribute it through relation-
ships with bloggers and others online.
SILVER
Blitz
A 55-person-strong army of
‘Blitizens’—and that clever Kinect hack—
draw the giants of Silicon Valley
■ BY CHRIS POLLACK cpollack@adage.com
IVAN TODOROV and Ken Martin were
still in college when they started Blitz
in Silicon Valley in 2001. Since then,
they have picked up an additional 53
employees and nearly half as many
clients.
“We started the company with the
core purpose of creating exceptional
experiences,” said CEO Mr. Todorov.
This appears to be a winning formula.
Blitz has grown nearly 200% in size
and revenue in the last three years.
Mr. Todorov said: “Innovation is a
core value at Blitz.” This was proved
when Yosef Flomin—a Blitizen in the
agency’s parlance for its employees—
hacked Microsoft’s Kinect as an experi-
ment. “Yosef was fascinated with the
newly released Kinect and SDK hacks
and took it upon himself to build a
proof-of concept that connected the
Microsoft hardware to Flash and use it
as a physical navigation device,” said
Mr. Todorov. Basically, he took Kinect
and turned it into an input device for a
Flash interface, which is much more
developer friendly than Kinect’s native
C++.
MEKANICS:
(Clockwise from top l.):
Tommy Means,
Jason Harris, Ian
Kovalik, Pete Caban
THE WORK: (From
top) eBay, “That’s
Brisk” with Eminem,
Crocs-7-Ounce
waters with a series of animated web
videos of celebrities and finally capped
it off with a Super Bowl campaign. It
ended up as the No. 1 most-viewed
video on YouTube after the Super
Bowl and sales spiked 31% over projections.
“We don’t necessarily see that
Brisk work as a Super Bowl ad,” Mr.
Means said. “We see it as part of a
machine that has to work together.”
After winning agency-of-record
duties for Brisk and Amp in the past
year, Pepsi is now one of the agency’s
biggest clients, along with Samsung
and Crocs. Last year, revenue jumped
to $25 million, up 38% from the year
prior.
THE WORK:
Adobe’s
Creativity
Conducted
wall and
John
Mayer’s
Heartbreak
Warfare
BLITZED: Founders
Ivan Todorov (top)
and Ken Martin
Experience Center. The wall will be
installed in August or September of
this year at the Adobe headquarters in
San Jose as well as later in San
Francisco.
Many of the agency’s other clients
are in the tech space (Microsoft Corp.,
Google) or near it (Nike and FX
Networks). “We became exceptionally
good at transforming how technology
marketing is done—from speeds and
feeds to telling stories that connect with
humans,” said Mr. Todorov.
It’s not all testosterone, though. The
agency also created an augmented-real-
ity video to promote John Mayer’s
“Battle Studies” album and helped
launch Zoobles, a toy line—and
COPPA-compliant gaming site—for
little girls.
