A new flag flies over the historic city hall building in Santa Ana, home to one of Orange County’s oldest independent advertising agencies.
There was no coup d’état, but the firm’s old name—DGWB—is nonetheless gone, replaced by a circus tent logo and a new moniker: Amusement Park.
The name change is the latest in a wave of modifications that started three months ago when two DGWB partners—Chief Executive Mike Weisman and Executive Creative Director Jon Gothold—announced plans to join Los Angeles-based advertising veteran Jimmy Smith and former DGWB chief marketing officer Ed Collins to form Amusement Park Brands.
Mandi Dossin, a longtime DGWB partner and the firm’s general manager, left to start her own consultancy. DGWB Advertising & Communications continued as a separate entity for a couple of months, providing personnel and other resources for the new venture.
“Our intention was to transition from DGWB to Amusement Park, it was just a question of how long is that going to take—six months, a year,” Gothold said. “Then in a rare burst of democratic process, we got the whole agency together in an all-hands meeting.”
The vote came down to whether the agency should “do it slow,” Gothold recounted, or “yank the Band-Aid right off.”
The notion of a quick yank won in a landslide—and the only sting was sentimental.
“I remember thinking, ‘Does anybody feel nostalgic about this name?’” Gothold said.
It’s not the first name change for the agency, which was cofounded by Jim deYong, Dan Ginsberg, Weisman and Cheryl Bailey in 1988 and debuted as dGWB Advertising. Bailey left the agency in 1992 to become a writer, and deYong followed suit in 1994 to become an advertising consultant. Ginsberg joined fast-food chain Hardee’s Food Systems Inc. in 1995 as vice president of marketing. Weisman invited Dossin, then the agency’s director of client services, and then-associate creative director Gothold to move up to equal partner status in 1996.
The agency changed its name subtly, switching the first initial to uppercase, with DGWB reflecting Dossin, and the G standing for Gothold.
“It’s a horrible series of letters,” Gothold said. “But at that time, that’s kind of what you did. You have FCB, BBDO, that’s all guys’ names, and we were terribly old school. Now you have (ad shop names like) Razorfish and 72andSunny. It’s funny, because over the years we would hire new business consultants, and they would all say, ‘The first thing we have to do is change your name because it just sucks,’ and we’d be like, ‘Hey, that’s my name man.’”
Gothold and his partners also did away with DGWB as a separate undertaking and simplified the company name to Amusement Park. Various divisions of the agency are housed under its “big top,” including advertising, public relations, entertainment, sports marketing, music and technology.
“That’s just a better way to go, because everything fits under that overarching umbrella,” Gothold said.
Smith, Amusement Park’s chairman and chief creative officer, is credited with groundbreaking ads and sponsored entertainment for brands such as Nike Inc. and Gatorade Inc. He retained ownership of Los Angeles-based Amusement Park Entertainment, a company he founded in 2011 and that’s partially backed by New York-based The Interpublic Group of Cos.
“We see it as a production company,” Gothold said. “If we sell a TV show concept, the production of that show will go through Amusement Park Entertainment.”
New Model
The new entity was named after Smith’s venture. Its founding philosophy was moving away from a model “that’s been in place forever and ever—that advertising is designed to disrupt whatever it is that you’re doing.”
The new model, he said, recognizes that technology “allows the ability to skip advertising messages, so it’s easier for [consumers] to ignore you,” Gothold said. “The way to combat that is to create advertising events and entertainment that yes, it’s a form of advertising, but it’s a form of advertising that people really like.”
The agency, which employs 90 and had an estimated $10.2 million in revenue last year, retains its roster of clients, which includes Hilton Garden Inn, Toshiba, Dole, California Avocado Commission, Chicken of the Sea, Yogurtland and Wienerschnitzel.
“We’ve been concerned that there would be more client resistance and that (name) equity is really going to be a big deal, and so far it hasn’t been,” he said. “The core of the agency leadership stayed, all the staff stayed. A lot of times when there is these kinds of changes and mergers and stuff like that, there is a lot of fallout, and that hasn’t happened. Everybody sees it as the next logical step for us and that it opens up new possibilities that they didn’t have before, and people are just genuinely excited about it.”
Amusement Park also notched the first account win under its new name—the Los Angeles County Fair, which advertises heavily in the run-up to its annual late-summer schedule.
“The irony or the synergy is not lost on us that it’s our first announcement of a win as Amusement Park, and L.A. County Fair is kind of an amusement park,” Gothold said. “That seems very fitting that that would be the way we get off the ground, so it’s very exciting.”
Latino Market
The assignment includes producing all advertising materials—direct mail, digital, outdoor and print—as well as public relations strategy and English- and Spanish-language TV and radio ads.
“We’ll transcreate television ads we are working on, as well as radio ads,” he said. “That’s not new to us. We used to do a lot more Spanish-language work than we are currently doing, and I hope that this allows us to get back into that game a little bit more.”
Clients of then-DGWB’s Latino division, Adelante, included fast food chains KFC in Louisville, Ky., and Wienerschnitzel in Irvine.
“It seemed like all of our general market clients, when the recession hit and the going got tough, they just curtailed Spanish-language advertising,” Gothold said. “We set up that capability for the general market clients we already had, and we didn’t go out and pitch Spanish language-only work.”
