Minneapolis Advertising Agency, Minneapolis PR Firm: Pocket Hercules

Sure, Pocket Hercules is a full-service advertising agency — one that’s growing revenue at a rate of 15 percent, and this month will expand its Warehouse District offices by 25 percent, to 5,100 square feet.

But — like the old ad pitch goes — wait, there’s more. Pocket Hercules also has launched unusual sideline businesses, including a beer company and specialty coffee producer. The spinoffs were hatched as a way to show off the firm’s branding, but both are turning into fast-growing operations in their own right.

The growth, all from a business with just 14 employees, underscores the message behind that strange name — small, but strong. And it’s pegging its future to landing clients with similar mindsets.

“I think every brand we work with would tell you that people think they’re bigger than they are,” said Jack Supple, chief creative officer for the Minneapolis agency, which was recognized by Advertising Age as its Midwest Small Agency of the Year in 2009.

That approach has helped Pocket Hercules grow steadily. It generated $2.5 million in revenue in 2010, and is projecting growth of 15 percent this year. In the past 12 months, it has added several new clients, including Marvin Windows’ APEX Siding System, Phi Delta Theta International, Shimano Cycling and Minnesota Philanthropy Partners (a collaboration between The St. Paul Foundation, Minnesota Community Foundation and other charities).

Pocket Hercules was founded in 2005 by the former Carmichael Lynch creative team of Jason Smith and Tom Camp, who believed the nimbler small-agency approach was a better way to serve clients. Supple, Carmichael Lynch’s former chairman and chief creative officer, joined them in January 2007.

The plan was always to keep things small.

“There are only maybe six invaluable people working on any given project, so why should the client pay for the other 294 people at the agency who aren’t working on their account?” Camp said. “We decided to take just those six invaluable people and build the agency around that.”

Pocket Hercules’ client roster includes Mortenson Construction, Rapala fishing lures, Gorilla Glue adhesives and Thomson Reuters’ Findlaw website.

Among Pocket Hercules’ most recent work is a campaign for Rapala, with the tagline, “Because fish aren’t dumb.” The ads feature images of fish at the library, in a science lab and playing chess.

“They set the bar a little higher each year, but they’re constantly thinking of new marketing ideas to try,” said Rapala USA President Tom Mackin, who worked with the Pocket Hercules principals at Carmichael Lynch, which previously handled the Rapala account.

In addition to the work it does for its clients, Pocket Hercules also has created a couple of brands of its own. The first was Lakemaid Beer, which it launched in 2008 to benefit three clients: Rapala, Schell’s Brewing Co. and the International Game Fish Association. It now sells nearly 50,000 cases a year in the five-state area.

In 2009, it partnered with Roastery 7 in Brooklyn Center to form Tiny Footprint Coffee, a carbon-negative brand of coffee that uses a portion of its proceeds to plant trees in Ecuador’s Mindo Cloudforest. It’s sold through retailers such as Amazon.com, Kowalski’s Markets and Surdyk’s Liquor. Sales have jumped 400 percent to 2,500 pounds per month.

“We come from brand backgrounds,” Supple said of the ventures, which are profitable. “We know how to build a brand.”

Based in Oxford, Ohio, across the street from the campus of Miami University of Ohio where it was founded in 1848, Phi Delta Theta serves more than 235,000 members and 160,000 living alumni. Phi Delta Theta members have included international business leaders of Fortune 500 corporations and major nonprofits, national public office holders, influential journalists, and entertainers.  One of its most famous alum includes astronaut Neil Armstrong, who took a Phi Delta Theta pin with him when he became the first person to walk on the Moon.

Pocket Hercules is assisting Phi Delta Theta with redeveloping its brand in light of one of the greatest growth spurts in the history of the 163-year-old fraternity.  A growth spurt that Scott Mietchen, the Fraternity’s General Council President, says is due to its groundbreaking decision made by this Greek fraternal organization more than 10 years ago, when it decided to eliminate alcohol from its chapter houses across North America.

“Phi Delta Theta chose to return the focus of the Fraternity to its founding principles in the face of growing concerns and evidence concerning alcohol abuse (and related problems) on college campuses across the country,” said Jack Supple, managing director of Pocket Hercules, “They made the tough decision to do the right thing and to blaze a new trail for college fraternities.  Ten years later, Phi Delta Theta is stronger than ever offering its members a unique fraternal experience that emphasizes academic performance, lifetime fellowship, and values-based leadership -- all the ingredients that young men need to succeed and live with integrity in today’s complex world.”

Pocket Hercules’ work will include developing a new brand platform and provide the strategic direction to communicate the new Phi Delta Theta brand across multiple media platforms, including traditional, social and mobile media.  The new brand platform will be essential for Phi Delta Theta to accelerate membership growth and continue to reconnect with alumni.

“The intent of focusing our brand is to capture the spirit of today’s Phi Delta Theta,” added Mietchen. “There’s a huge demand for the type of values-based, leadership-driven fraternity experience that we offer.  We believe Pocket Hercules, which has a track record of branding for enthusiast groups, has the strategic and creative energy to help us communicate the essence of who we are and what we stand for.”

Formed five years ago, Pocket Hercules (www.pockethercules.com) is a Minneapolis-based advertising, public relations, interactive and branding firm that packs the power punch of a full-scale agency in a smaller and more nimble model.  The firm represents companies and organizations that have a desire to connect with brand enthusiasts by bringing their brands to life in potent, unexpected ways and creating ideas that people love to view and talk about.  Clients include Pearl Izumi, ZEISS Sports Optics, Rapala, Sufix, Lakemaid Beer, Gorilla Glue, G. Loomis, Findlaw.com, and Key Surgical, among others.

It's hard not to fixate on the old Moby Dick's sign near the front door of Pocket Hercules' Warehouse District loft space. And hard not to think that it's a splendid symbol for this five-year-old ad agency.

There are some important differences. Unlike that infamous dive (infamous to people of a certain age—it was demolished along with the rest of the old Block E in 1988), Pocket Hercules doesn't have a floor sticky with the spilled beer and spewed blood of countless bar fights.

But that sign—it's old school. So are the metal signs advertising mostly defunct brands of pop and gasoline that adorn Pocket Hercules' office walls. Most have come from the collection of Jason Smith, one of Pocket Hercules' three managing principals. Smith found the Moby Dick's sign several years ago under the staircase of a Minneapolis architectural salvage emporium. Those signs are one of Smith's enthusiasms. And Moby Dick's certainly had its enthusiasts (so this scribe has heard). It was a community of sorts.

And like Moby Dick's, Pocket Hercules has plenty of involvement with sea creatures and beer—embodied in particular by Lakemaid, a brew it developed with a client, fishing lure maker Rapala. Moby's bragged that it served "a whale of a drink." And in a way, Pocket Hercules is in the distilling business. Smith talks about his copywriter partners, Jack Supple and Tom Camp, having the "unique ability to take really murky complex problems and just distill them down to black and white, simple, digestible pieces of information that consumers can understand and are relevant to them."

It's an old-school approach to advertising—very direct, with no irrelevant touches that are more about how clever the ad is than what the product is about. No game-y digital effects or "funny" characters.

And in that oldness is something very new. It's less about the brand's message and more about the community around that brand. Pocket Hercules' clients aren't huge, but they have national presences: They include several fishing-related companies like Shimano and G. Loomis rods and reels, as well as B2B, medical, and nonprofit clients.

Many agencies talk about "brand communities" and how "consumers own the brand." Perhaps because the brands it works with are so focused in their products, Pocket Hercules actually walks that talk. It doesn't see those consumers solely as consumers. They're enthusiasts who influence each other.

Our work is very distilled and pure in its purpose," Supple says. "It isn't encumbered by long, deadly kinds of processes that make it less potent."

That might sound like a subtle dig against Supple's previous employer, local ad giant Carmichael Lynch, where he was chairman by the time he left. It's not. He loved the work he did there, particularly with one of Carmichael's top clients, Harley-Davidson. The agency helped Harley leverage an identity as an enthusiast brand, focused on a community, not a mass market. But as a top executive at Carmichael several years into the new millennium, Supple was beginning to feel trapped in "an ivory tower," disconnected from the beating heart of creative projects.

In 2005, Smith and Camp, who'd been Supple's colleagues at Carmichael Lynch (and who'd also worked on the Harley account), struck out on their own. Supple joined them a couple of years later to help direct their start-up agency. It had taken as its moniker the nickname of Turkish weightlifter Naim Süleymanoglu, whose four-ten stature didn't keep him from winning Olympic gold medals in the 1990s. Among the agency's own awards: Advertising Age's 2009 small agency of the year for the Midwest.

Pocket Hercules may be a young agency chronologically, but its veteran staff gives it a less twitchy, more serious air than agencies dominated by Millennials. And while numerous agencies have been shedding staff, Pocket Hercules' employee number grew nearly 25 percent last year. Sure, that was from a small base—the company now employs 16. (It expected 2010 revenues of $2.5 million, a roughly 25 percent increase.) But size hasn't kept Pocket Hercules from being able to use just about any kind of platform—print, TV, radio, online—that a large agency can. It's not rocket science.

But it does require knowing the customer not as the member of a focus group, a mass-market segment, or a target. It means working closely with a client's top people, with as few layers as possible.

"Our clients don't want a lot of process," Smith says. "They want to see movement and things progress."

"They don't want to lose control," Supple adds. "They don't want to see a lot of money poured down nine months of people talking to one another and the resultant idea isn't very good."

"It's the difference between a marketing director making a decision versus a committee," Smith says. "Things get watered down. There aren't a lot of great decisions that come out of showing your work to 10 or 12 people."

To be sure, there are many clients, particularly large ones, that find levels of bureaucracy and months of back-and-forth useful, even comforting. But when Minneapolis-based Mortenson Construction hired Pocket Hercules to create marketing materials for its wind energy services, it was looking for the direct approach.

"I wanted a smaller agency that had a lot of bench strength," says Cameron Snyder, Mortenson's communications director. Snyder has worked in marketing on both the client side with Andersen Windows and Target and on the agency side at Campbell Mithun and Kerker (now Preston Kelly). "There's this misperception that smaller agencies don't have something that a larger agency does, and I find that completely inaccurate," he adds. "A lot of smaller agencies nowadays are filled with veteran talent and they're very nimble. They provide exceptional service. That was what I was looking for."

Pocket Hercules likes to get close to a client in order to find that communal core. "Intimate" may be too strong a word. Or in the case of Pearl Izumi, maybe it's not too strong. The Colorado-based maker of athletic gear, mostly for runners and bicyclists, hired Pocket Hercules to get back on the enthusiasts' radar. Pearl Izumi, Smith says, was "kind of a sleepy brand in that it was one of the larger manufacturers of bike gear, but there were some really high-end boutique brands coming out of Europe that were seen as better." Pearl, he adds, "was looking to get its edge back."

And what's edgier than getting naked—or at least feeling that way? This year, readers of bicycling magazines and Web sites will witness Pocket Hercules' campaign for Pearl Izumi's top-end bicycle clothing line. The ads emphasize the garments' form-fitting characteristics in some provocative ways. Though not appropriate for more sensitive clients, it works for Pearl's cyclist customers, who after all are very pelvically focused. Last April Fools Day, to promote the "enhanced precision anatomic shaping process" of Pearl's chamois inserts for bicycle shorts, Pocket Hercules released an online video called "Project Uranus." Google it. Yes, you caught the pun. The video went viral across the globe—as of January 5, it had more than 16,000 hits on YouTube alone.

"We do things that people want to see and talk about," Supple says. To do that, "we've always looked at the enthusiasts at the top of the ladder and tried to adopt their attitudes and become one of them. They are the influencers, because they are the ones who influence the opinions all the way down the food chain."

That means you can't talk down to them, the way mass-minded marketers often do. It also means not getting too cute and "creative." Last year, Pocket Hercules produced a series of TV commercials for Gorilla Glue. The Cincinnati-based superglue maker has done nearly all of its marketing in house, and had never run commercials before. It had tried working with agencies in the past, but as Lauren Connley, Gorilla Glue's director of marketing, recalls, "No matter how many times we said, 'No bananas, no jungles,' people kept coming back to us with amazing ideas about bananas and jungles."

Pocket Hercules, she adds, "caught the person who uses the product. They got that person very quickly. It's about this tough, strong product, but it's also about how that product makes the person feel: They're empowered, they're tough and strong. 'Self-reliant' is a word [Pocket Hercules] used a lot. And we loved that. They embodied the person that uses the product rather than [presenting] a gorilla."

Agencies often experience roller coaster revenues. Looking to smooth those out a bit, Pocket Hercules hit upon creating its own products. Other shops, in town and elsewhere, have offered software and digital novelties developed in house. Pocket Hercules took a different route—real, tangible consumer goods.

Its first was Lakemaid, introduced in 2008, brewed by August Schell in New Ulm, and directed toward avid freshwater fishermen—and, Supple hastens to add, fisherwomen. But even those who find walleye more appealing on a plate than in a plastic bucket can appreciate the art of the Lakemaid brand. There's the pinup-style art of mermaids who are part freshwater sport fish—too playful to be sexist (maybe not everyone agrees). The woodsy design recalls the pines and lofty balsams summoned up in the Hamm's beer jingle. Last year, Pocket Hercules invoked another historical marketing reference for Lakemaid, installing a set of billboards on Highway 10 heading north out of St. Cloud reminiscent of those for another famous Minnesota brand, Burma-Shave.

By creating its own product, Pocket Hercules was able to better "understand what it's like to be a client," Supple says. It's learned that in more ways than one: Pocket Hercules has been getting calls from people selling broadcast space and online banner ads, as well as those seeking Lakemaid's sponsorship of fishing events. "Now we're a mark for all that," Supple notes.

Since its launch, about 100,000 cases of Lakemaid have been sold, enough to encourage Pocket Hercules to bring out a second product last April: Tiny Footprint coffee, produced by Twin Cities firm Roastery 7. Pocket Hercules calls it a "carbon negative" coffee: For every pound sold, the agency supports the planting of a tree in Ecuador's Mindo cloud forest. More than 2,000 pounds had been sold as of late 2010, primarily to colleges, corporations, and food co-ops—communities that care about carbon. Pocket Hercules even contemplated opening a Tiny Footprint coffeehouse in Minneapolis.

"We were talked out of it," Smith says. "We were told by a consultant, 'You don't want to run a coffeehouse. There are a lot of headaches. The profit margins aren't there.'"

Pocket Hercules itself is profitable. It's still small, and probably will remain that way. But its existence points to some something big that happening in the ad industry: Size doesn't matter. The client and its customer do. An agency doesn't have to be a whale to catch that.

Twin Cities Business, February, 2011
http://www.tcbmag.com/industriestrends/marketingandpr/133873p1.aspx

Jack joined Pocket Hercules in early 2007—the agency was founded by two other Carmichael Lynch vets, Jason Smith and Tom Camp. All three wanted to build an agency that let them work more directly with clients—and react more quickly and specifically to market changes—than the bureaucratic layers of a large agency allow. Those are attributes that clients with pocket-sized marketing budgets especially seek.

The gather-‘round-the-brand work that Carmichael Lynch did (and still does) for Harley-Davidson—Jack had been CL’s chairman before his current gig—is one of Pocket Hercules’ driving models. Traditional ad campaigns? Check. But sickos typically leap to different lures. Dig if you will this “urine chart” posted on porta-stalls at running events for Pearl Izumi. Runners can check their urine’s color pre- and post-marathon to see whether they’re too dehydrated or need to boost certain nutrient levels:

It also gives them something entertaining to read while waiting for a john to open up.

Then there’s this viral April Fool’s bike shorts promotion for Pearl Izumi called Project Uranus, which, um—well, check the video. Brand intimacy? You got it, pal.

Besides its outdoorsy, enthusiast bent, what makes Pocket Hercules distinctive locally and nationally is that it’s also its own client—it’s creating its own products. In 2008, it introduced Lakemaid Beer, a “fisherman’s beer.” (It’s brewed by Schell’s.)

Fun? Sexist? Both? You be the judge. Jack notes that Lakemaid, which sold about 50,000 cases last year and looks to sell more this year, has a lot of Facebook friends who are women. Sickos are increasingly female.

Me, I’d say that Lakemaid evinces a certain retro charm. Among its promotional efforts, Pocket Hercules put up Burma-Shave–style signs on Route 371 heading north from St. Cloud this summer:

(For you young people reading this: Burma-Shave was a shaving cream brand that originated in Minneapolis.) In an indirect but real way, Lakemaid playfully resurrects the spirit of another Minnesota brew with cabin appeal—Hamm’s, back when it originated from the land of sky-blue waters.

On a different (but still potable) note: Pocket Hercules’ second product, Tiny Footprint Coffee. Introduced in April, Tiny Footprint is billed as “carbon negative” coffee—its farming (shade grown) and its roasting (by Roastery 7 in Minneapolis). A part of the purchase price of each bag is donated to the “rebuilding” of the Mindo cloudforest in Ecuador. Pocket Hercules would like to open a Tiny Footprint coffeehouse, if they can find the right location.

By creating their own products, Pocket Hercules believes it understands more deeply the financial and business challenges their clients face when launching or marketing a product. The Herculeans also hope that the products can provide revenue streams that can smooth out the monthly ups and downs of typical agency income cycles.

In other words, the entrepreneurial endeavors provide a fresh perspective into sicko minds. Not that they don’t know a lot about that already: Jack loves to fish, Jason’s a golf fanatic, and Tom is an avid traveler and tri-athlete who’s ridden his bicycle through Laotian jungles.

As Stephen Dupont, who heads up Pocket Hercules’ PR practice, observes, “We’re sickos, too.”

 

Twin Cities Business, July 29, 2010
http://tcbmag.blogs.com/btw/2010/07/

Managing partners Jack Supple, Tom Camp and Jason Smith, all veterans of the larger, global holding-company-owned Carmichael Lynch firm, say Pocket Hercules provides senior-level talent minus the big-agency overhead.

Seeing the agency world fragment and technology enable smaller groups to flourish, Camp and Smith left Carmichael Lynch in 2005 to start Pocket Hercules, a full-service advertising, interactive and public relations company focusing on national clients.

Supple, formerly chairman and chief creative officer at Carmichael Lynch, joined them in 2007. Stephen Dupont, who had worked with Supple, Camp and Smith at Carmichael Lynch as a partner and director of media relations, came to Pocket Hercules as vice president of public relations in 2008.

"We decided the big, huge block agency was probably not the future," Camp said. "We believed we could be more efficient and actually provide clients with a more streamlined, powerful model."

The idea, Smith continued, was "that more client dollars would go toward generating ideas and moving their brand forward and less toward overhead and layer."

The approach appears to be working. Revenue last year at Pocket Hercules hit $2.3 million, up 15 percent from 2008. This year is looking as good as last year, and possibly better, according to Supple.

While some agencies have lost half their staff to the recession, Smith proudly points out that Pocket Hercules has made two hires this year and now has 14 employees.

The firm also underscores the rise, at least locally, of smaller agencies exercising their creative and entrepreneurial strength where some larger firms have faltered. Taking note of the trend, Advertising Age last September named Pocket Hercules its Midwest Small Agency of the Year.

With an efficient model already in place, Pocket Hercules didn't have to change much when the recession hit, Supple said. Growth over the past couple of years has been primarily organic, additional assignments from existing clients and new business from word-of-mouth referrals. The nod from Ad Age also has helped build business. Interactive, viral and guerrilla marketing work helped fill in for a drop in traditional media.

"We do hands-on work for national brands, working directly with them," Supple said.

National clients include Carl Zeiss sports optics, Pearl Izumi, which makes high-tech apparel and shoes for runners and cyclists, and newcomer Gorilla Glue. Pocket Hercules also has done extensive work with the Prairie Club, a semi-private golf destination opening soon in Nebraska's Sandhills region.

Both agency and client
Smaller clients include Pocket Hercules itself, as the company further seeks to redefine the agency model by developing, branding and launching its own new products into the marketplace.

The first, beginning two years ago, was Lakemaid beer. Pocket Hercules came up with the idea -- "Why aren't there freshwater mermaids?" as Supple said -- and worked with August Schell Brewing Co. and Rapala USA to produce and promote the brew, now available in seven states and exported to a handful of European countries.

This year's new product is Tiny Footprint Coffee, which Pocket Hercules touts as the world's first carbon-negative coffee.

For now the coffee, produced by Minneapolis artisan wholesaler Roastery 7, is available only through Amazon.com. Pocket Hercules, however, is looking for retail space to open a coffee shop where customers can buy the beans or a freshly brewed cup of Tiny Footprint coffee.

"It's a new way of doing business for an ad agency," Smith said. "You're not solely relying on billable projects or billable hours from clients. You're kind of taking your destiny into your own hands a bit."

Outside clients say they're happy with the agency's work.

"They come up with really smart, creative ideas and directions," said Cache Mundy, vice president of marketing for Pearl Izumi. "They're very effective in figuring out how to get those things done, get them done on a modest budget and have a big impact."

An example, Mundy said, was the video that Pocket Hercules produced for Pearl Izumi's Anatomic P.R.O. 4D Chamois, which is incorporated into its cycling shorts and bibs and is designed to keep cyclists cool and comfortable when they ride.

The video, launched with an April Fools Day press release touting Pearl Izumi's aim to put the product "on one of the harshest environments in the solar system -- Uranus," quickly went viral, getting tens of thousands of hits on cycling blogs and websites. (See it at pearlonuranus.com).

Cameron Snyder, communications manager at Mortenson Construction, said Pocket Hercules has become a "good strategic partner" while working on the company's brand and with its renewable energy group.

"They're an exceptionally strong small agency that prides itself on being that," Snyder said. "They're almost like a member of your own team."

The expert says: Sam Smolley, president of the Advertising Federation of Minnesota and account manager at the Creative Group, said the small-agency trend that Pocket Hercules represents will only continue.

Creatives with entrepreneurial vision find smaller firms more attractive, Smolley said, and some clients do as well.

"The people that are pitching the work are doing the work," Smolley said, instead of handing it off.

The smaller agency model also makes business sense, as the downturn showed, Smolley said. "They're able to turn the ship more quickly and be more proactive."

Developing products -- even looking to open a coffee shop -- will further demonstrate Pocket Hercules' abilities to new and potential clients.

"That's what our economy is built on, taking risk and hoping you do well," Smolley said. "It speaks to the entrepreneurial spirit of the small agency. You can't walk into one of the top five [agencies] and say, 'We should develop a product and launch it.' That's not their core focus.''

Minneapolis Star Tribune, May 31, 2010
http://www.startribune.com/business/95081734.html

They call it the “hybrid” approach, where each skill area is equally represented, and contributes to the larger whole. With a small staff—fewer than a dozen employees—and a funky office suffused with retro signage and rough-hewn wood accents, the agency has attracted clients like Carl Zeiss Sports Optics, Pearl Izumi, Rapala and Thomson Reuters.

It all started coming together in 2005, when founders Tom Camp and Jason Smith left Carmichael Lynch to launch the firm, and were soon hired by major creative agency Saatchi to help kick off the introduction of the Toyota Tundra. A few years later, another Carmichael veteran, Jack Supple, signed on and the trio set out to change the way creative was done.

 “In a large agency with 300 people, you don’t have the chance to work as closely on an account, and see all the different angles you can take with brand development or public relations,” says Supple. “When you’re this small, it works easily, you can be nimble.”

A particularly unique aspect to the firm is the foray into product development. In an effort to reach Rapala’s fishermen customers more creatively, Pocket Hercules partnered with another client, the August Schell Brewing Co., to create Lakemaid Beer. Akin to mermaids, the ladies that adorn the beer’s label are half-woman, half-fish,but unlike their oceanic counterparts, these maids feature tails of walleye, sunfish, perch and other lake-dwelling fish. The agency’s vice president of PR, Stephen Dupont, serves as brewmaster. Another recent product, Tiny Footprint Coffee, is a nod toward the firm’s affection for fair trade goods.

Although the agency has numerous accounts, it tends to lean toward clients that have an enthusiast customer base—Rapala for fishing, for example, and Pearl Izumi for bikers.

“We help to sharpen and define the voice of companies,” says Camp. “We look at a company’s values as well as their products, and we turn that into something meaningful for enthusiasts. Translating that into different ways is the hybrid part. More and more, we find we’re not relying on the tra- ditional approach of print ads and TV spots; instead, we’re using different methods like product development and social media that are better at building word-of-mouth.”

In general, Pocket Hercules flexes its muscles as a brand caretaker, adds Smith. All of its efforts go into nurturing a brand, getting the word out, and thinking of creative ways to get attention for clients, while still having fun. “We capture the heart and soul of a brand,” Smith says. “We tap into what makes people passionate about a brand, and just go from there.”

BizBriefing:
Pocket Hercules
Headquarters: Minneapolis
Inception: 2005
Employees: 12
Revenue: $2M in 2008
Description: A full-service hybrid agency, with equal parts advertising, interactive, public relations and product development.
Website: pockethercules.com

Minnesota Business, February 2010
http://www.minnesotabusiness.com/driving-hybrid

Almost concurrently, another Minneapolis agency, Pocket Hercules, which has just 12 employees, was named "Midwestern Small Agency of the Year" by Advertising Age, another suggestion that small is the new big.

"This is clearly a trend," said Dean Buresh, a former big agency executive from Minneapolis who now is a communications consultant. "The old, large agencies will always be around but this is a pretty exciting time for smaller agencies."

Buresh said the Internet and other social marketing functions make it easier for small agencies to pitch their wares to clients. At the same time, he said, clients are becoming pickier about the advertising services they buy, primarily for budgetary reasons, and smaller agencies frequently carry smaller price tags.

Indeed, BDM poked fun at its larger competitors in a full-page ad in the New York Times after it was honored by the American Association of Advertising Agencies. In the ad BDM said, "Honestly, we'd rather be a medium or large agency. For a start, they get to charge three times what we do for the same work ...."

The three founding partners of BDM came from sizable agencies to form their 25-person shop 2 1/2 years ago.

David Murphy was the president of the Los Angeles office of Saatchi & Saatchi and moved to Minneapolis to join with two veterans from Minneapolis-based Fallon, Bob Barrie and Stuart D'Rozario.

Their first client was Sunset Marquis, a West Hollywood hotel that caters to the rock 'n' roll glitterati and other celebrities. But the firm really gained traction and attention when it landed the account of United Airlines, which had formerly been a Fallon client.

"Without a doubt, that put us on the map," Murphy said. "It sent a message to other marketers and agencies."

Pocket Hercules got its start in 2005 when Jason Smith and Tom Camp left Carmichael Lynch to set up their own shop. Chief creative officer and Carmichael Lynch veteran Jack Supple followed a year later.

Supple and his partners share an office in the Minneapolis Warehouse District that is adorned with an original neon sign of the whale that stood outside Moby Dick's, a long-gone but not forgotten Hennepin Avenue watering hole.

"The upside of being smaller is that you're closer to the work, and the clients feel that too. They enjoy the attention," said Supple. "The downside is that you can get real busy. But when you're in the small agency world, that's what you feed on -- energy."

The clients of Pocket Hercules include fishing lure giant Rapala USA, Carl Zeiss sports optics (binoculars, scopes), Pearl Izumi (high-tech apparel and shoes for runners and cyclists) and the Prairie Club, a designer-destination golf facility in the famous Sandhills region of Nebraska that is set to open next year.

Tom Mackin, president of Minnetonka-based Rapala USA, said his company followed Supple, Smith and Camp to Pocket Hercules after 40 years at Carmichael Lynch. Mackin said he likes the closeness that comes with working with a smaller agency.

"You have more direct contact with the people you work with. You get a lot of personal attention," said Mackin. Smaller agencies have the added benefit of costing less, he said, because fewer hands on an account means fewer billable hours.

Geoff Bremner, CEO of Modern Climate, which counts Best Buy and St. Jude Medical as clients, said smaller agencies are more adept at spotting marketing opportunities because the agency principals are on the front lines. "Clients are looking for material that is new and fresh," Bremner said.

BDM, for example, created a street marketing campaign to promote electronic bikes being test-marketed by Best Buy. "We had folks ride those e-bikes through the streets and in the Best Buy parking lot," said BDM's Murphy.

But small agencies have some of the same headaches as large ones.

The economy is one of those headaches. There's also overhead.

"From the outside looking in, people of big agencies probably think we can do whatever we want," Murphy said. "But this is still a business. We still look at finances. We have to develop a business plan. Everything is developed from scratch. There's no HR [human resources] person to work up a health care plan for employees. You have to get your fingers dirty in all aspects of the business."

"I don't think that small is the new big. I think small is the new better," Murphy quipped.

Star Tribune, October 7, 2009
http://www.startribune.com/business/63646567.html

No agency better illustrates that trend than Pocket Hercules, an 11-person creative juggernaut led by former Carmichael-Lynch Chairman and Chief Creative Jack Supple, alongside two other C-L creative standouts, Tom Camp and Jason Smith.
"I really feel like this is the Carmichael I joined in 1979," said Mr. Supple.

The shop aspires to use its big-agency experience without forcing clients to pay for big-agency overhead costs. "What we learned [at Carmichael] was how to work with brands at the apex, and how to make people feel a special way about them," he said.

At Pocket Hercules, that experience was on display in work for Pearl Izumi, a leading bicycle-shorts manufacturer that had been losing market share to European manufacturers whose products weren't as technically advanced. The agency's brief was to explain Pearl's technological advantage in a non-wonkish, non-elitist way.

'Happy ass'
So it chose a grinning donkey as a mascot and urged bikers to "have a happy ass" on an elaborate website and in print and out-of-home messages, as well as water bottles,

T-shirts and a "Win a happy ass for life" contest. To demonstrate how the shorts kept bikers cool, the agency put its donkey on an ice cube, telling bikers that "a cool ass is a happy ass." And to tout aerodynamics, it strapped a rocket on his back ("A fast ass is a happy ass," and so forth.

The work got the point -- technical superiority -- across: Sales rose 30% in a down market.

The agency, which derives nearly a quarter of its revenue from public relations, has demonstrated a knack for creating chatter about its clients. To launch craft brewer August Schell's Lakemaid Beer, the shop seeded fishing and beer blogs with chatter about the existence of mythical lakemaids, freshwater mermaids,.

Pocket Hercules built the Lakemaid brand from scratch, from the labels and packaging to the messaging. The campaign also benefitted and incorporated two other clients looking to reach younger consumers: Rapala USA, a major fishing-pole manufacturer, and the International Game Fishing Association, which was looking to raise its profile among young, freshwater fishermen.

The key to its social-media strategy for the launch was decidedly low-tech: a giant airplane banner, which somehow sent the brand's Facebook page ablaze. "It was about as high tech as a sandwich board," jokes Mr. Supple. Still, the banner -- along with descriptions of different "catches" on the inside of each bottle cap, which fueled a popular barroom game -- led to a product shortage as the launch exceeded expectations.

Not bad for a place with just 11 full-time employees and $2 million in revenue.

RUNNER UP: MONO
With Pocket Hercules, Mono is evidence that Minneapolis is the new bastion of Midwest creativity. In five years, it's built a list of cool brands that includes Herman Miller, Apple, Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day, NBA TV, and "Sesame Street." Behind it all is a boundary-less approach that's led the agency to ditch offices, not to mention distinctions between strategy and creative, design and advertising, or between traditional and digital media.

Advertising Age, September 14, 2009
http://adage.com/smallagencyawards2009/article?article_id=138960

Lakemaid is the creation of three-year-old Pocket Hercules, a Minneapolis advertising, branding, and public relations start-up launched by former creatives from ad house Carmichael Lynch. Jack Supple, a Pocket Hercules partner who was Carmichael’s chairman and chief creative officer, says that while an agency typically develops campaign ideas for a client in return for fees, in Lakemaid’s case, Pocket Hercules developed a product concept that it owns, and then offered its client, Rapala fishing lures, a chance to become a marketing partner.

“What they do is license the brand for clothing,” beer glasses, and the like, Supple says. Pocket Hercules owns the Lakemaid trademark and gets a piece of Rapala’s merchandising revenue. Pocket Hercules also licenses the brand to August Schell Brewing Company in New Ulm in return for a percentage of the beer sales. (Schell wasn’t a client, but has collaborated with Rapala on earlier projects, Supple says.) Both Schell and Rapala gain exposure for their brands in venues they wouldn’t reach with their existing advertising and marketing efforts.

For Rapala, that includes the aisles of Surdyk’s, MGM Liquor Warehouse, beer festivals, and lake-town bars. For Schell, Lakemaid is reaching not only a fishing audience, but the whole cabin culture, Supple says. Without both companies on board, the idea wouldn’t be so successful, he adds, but both were quick to join the project when presented with the opportunity.

“I think what it says is that nobody is walking around with a disposable budget that can just be thrown around at extra ideas,” Supple says. In the current environment, agencies have to shoulder more of the investment and risk in new ideas, he adds. Clients’ budgets are set, and for them, “it has to happen without a lot of expenditure, but with a lot of upside potential.”

A Beer for Fishing Season
Lakemaid is sold only during fishing season, and 12-packs of bottles feature all 12 of the Lakemaids—Miss Northern Pike, Miss Rainbow Trout, and others. In its first season, it sold about 17,000 cases. Now in its second season, sales had surpassed that by late May. Lakemaid has added beer in cans this year and expanded distribution into three more Midwestern states, for a total of eight. Co-creator Jack Supple says, “Fishing goes all over the country, so we’re thinking that the idea of the beer should as well.”

Twin Cities Business, July 2009
http://www.tcbmag.com/industriestrends/marketingandpr/117646p1.aspx

The two founding partners were Tom Camp, who worked at CL in Minneapolis for 12 years as a writer and creative director. And then Jason Smith had been at CL since 1996 as an art director and was a major force on the Harley Davidson account.

They then added John Supple, who was once named chairman and chief creative office of Carmichael Lynch, worked at the agency for 27 years. Supple, also happens to be a serious fisherman. Check out his big “supertanker” catch story here. Or, just be as amused as we were by the photograph. That thing is HUGE.

Oh yeah – PH has Northwest Airlines, Pearl Izumi and some other brands on their roster. Not bad for one year’s worth of work.

Agency Spy, December 27, 2007
http://www.mediabistro.com/agencyspy/sorta-new-agency-alert-pocket-hercules_b120