SMALLAGENCY AWARDS
AGENCY OF THE YEAR
MIDWEST
GOLD
Space150
For a shop where change is (literally) an absolute
constant, success comes with the territory
WEST
GOLD
Odopod
With digital as its bread and butter, shop
serves up a hearty helping of ingenuity
■ BY MAUREEN MORRISON
mcmorrison@adage.com
IT MAY SEEM excessive for an
agency to change its identity every
150 days, but that’s exactly what
Space150 does (hence the name).
Every five months, the shop
updates everything from business
cards to the website to signage on
the door.
“We call them versions, like
software,” said Space150 founder
Billy Jurewicz. “If you try to invent
a mission statement for 20 years,
it’s tough to predict what that’s
going to be like. Even the
Constitution has amendments.”
The agency just launched its
28th version, this one helmed by its
president, Marcus Fischer.
“Everything we preach is that
change is constant and permanent,
so we live it and breathe it,” he said.
That philosophy goes back to
the agency’s founding in 2000, just
as the tech bubble burst. Many
agencies touting digital prowess
didn’t make it past the dot-com collapse, and Mr. Jurewicz knew that in
order to survive, his agency had to
constantly evolve. What started primarily as a small digital shop has
turned into an agency that executes
campaigns with interactive billboards, creates proprietary software
and even has a research-and-devel-opment think tank called Spacelab.
■ BY KUNUR PATEL kpatel@adage.com
Some of the agency’s biggest
clients have included American
Express, Optum Health and Dairy
Queen. But the agency’s standout
work comes from clients such as
Discover Boating, where the agency
turned to Facebook to sell boating in
the midst of the recession, when
families were vacationing less.
Space150 also took over Times
Square for clothing retailer Forever
21 with a digital billboard using
computer-vision technology to create an augmented reality for pedestrians. The billboard featured models snapping pictures of pedestrians, then picking them up, kissing
them and putting them in their
bags.
The agency, based in
Minneapolis with offices in New
York and Los Angeles, has grown to
include 134 employees, a 55% jump
in head count since 2009. In 2010
Space150 took in $24.2 million in
revenue, a 72% increase from
2009—the height of the recession.
IT’S SOMETIMES TOUGH to call
this 11-year-old firm in spitting
distance of Silicon Valley anything as straightforward as an ad
agency.
“Since day one at Odopod, we’ve
always tried to do product work and
marketing work since our interests
have spanned both,” said Founder-Creative Director Tim Barber.
As he sees it, the agency was
built from the ashes of the dot-com
bubble. After the company that
bought their new-media boutique
went defunct, Mr. Barber and part-
ners David Bliss and Jacquie Moss
dusted themselves off and started
Odopod, a name that sews together
Godzilla’s island “Odo” and “pod”
to be reminiscent of seeds. Its first
client in 2000 was a startup, and the
agency designed not an ad, but a
file-sharing tool. Next up was an
online marketing campaign for
Nike’s then-new skateboarding line.
GOLD
Zambezi
Diverse staff and a push to be ‘resourceful,
adaptable, undeniable’ propels hotshop
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■ BY NATALIE ZMUDA nzmuda@adage.com
CHRIS RAIH AND Brian Ford first
met on the rooftop at Wieden &
Kennedy, Portland, Ore., where
they worked on the Nike Basketball
business. It was an auspicious meet-ing.In 2006,the pair left big-agency
life behind and founded Zambezi,
based in Venice, Calif.
The 26-person shop is named for
the shark that populates the African
river of the same name, because the
fish is “resourceful, adaptable and
undeniable.” Also, it’s just a cool
name. Mr. Raih, 28 when Zambezi
got off the ground, says his
“Rolodex wasn’t super strong” but
he and Mr. Ford had “a lot of belief
and hustle.”
“We took our lumps, as most
companies did during the global
financial crisis,” Mr. Raih says.
“Our growth stalled, but we’ve
punched things back, and I’m
happy to say we’ve come scream-
ing out of the recession.”
Zambezi has tripled its number
of full-time staffers in the last year,
is moving to bigger digs Labor Day
weekend, and is about to open an
office in Shanghai. The Shanghai
office will service Li-Ning; Zambezi
is the global agency of record for
the company’s basketball business.
But Mr. Raih says the office, which
will initially have a staff of three,
should also position the agency to
support western brands that are
expanding to China.
