Leaving the fold of a large advertising agency came with its angst, but Ken Muench and his colleague at Draftfcb, Jeff Fox, saw their spot in a changing industry and seized the chance to make a name for themselves.
Their startup, Collider LLC, temporarily housed in client Taco Bell Corp.’s offices in Irvine, aims to provide a new type of marketing service and tap cultural shifts in order to change the look and feel of today’s advertising.
Muench, former director of strategic planning for the Irvine office of global advertising network Draftfcb, and Fox, the agency’s former executive vice president and managing director, kicked off their venture earlier this month.
The business partners defined the past couple of weeks as “a balance of nerves and excitement” and said they’re eager to fill a gap in the advertising and marketing world.
“Companies are growing again, and the need for proper positioning of products and brand strategy is much more important now,” said Muench, who prior to joining Draftfcb worked at Grupo Gallegos of Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa-based Casanova Pendrill Inc. “It’s scary, even though we know it’s a great idea and we already have clients.”
But the pair’s future at Draftfcb was far from secure.
Their move comes on the heels of last month’s announcement that Draftfcb will move the majority of its operations to the Venice district of L.A. while its sister agency, Deutch LA, churns out ads for Taco Bell, even though Draftfcb is still the fast-food chain’s advertising agency of record.
Collider is also working with Taco Bell on several “innovation and strategic marketing projects” that don’t include creative services. Instead, it’s focusing on using cultural insights to help the fast-food chain and other companies position their products and brands.
Culture
In fact, culture is a big reason the partners zeroed in on Santa Ana for the fledgling agency’s future home. They’ll settle in a new office next month in the downtown business district among taquerias, art galleries and trendy restaurants.
“It’s important for us to be in a culturally relevant and dense part of Orange County,” Muench said. “It’s very difficult to say, ‘I work in Irvine, and I know about culture.’ McMansions and tract homes do not equal culture. We need offices where we can walk out every day and be surrounded by artists and coffee shops and vibrancy so we can live and breathe that culture every day, all the time.”
Muench and Fox said their focus is now more about helping companies channel quickly changing American culture than about advertising products.
“What we bring is, ‘This is what’s happening in pop culture that’s going to affect you.’ We give clients a different way of looking at their marketing strategy or their innovation. We’ll say, ‘Hey, you may be positioned correctly based on what the consumer wants, but are you positioned incorrectly based on cultural trends?’ ”
Those trends are dictated by the millennial generation, which is “growing up,” Muench said, “and the last thing they want to do is be mainstream.
“Cultural tendencies have completely reversed, and it’s no longer a celebration of the center but rather a search on the fringes, so you need to be able as a brand to define yourself on the fringes of the culture and say, ‘It’s not about the middle of street.’ With social media and the rapid nature of how quickly information travels and how much the consumer is directly involved with your brand, you have to be culturally relevant. Otherwise, you become a dinosaur.”
Taco Bell
While at Draftfcb, the duo helped conceptualize that idea with their “Live Más” slogan for Taco Bell.
“Ten or 15 years ago, culture was positioned that food is fuel, go quickly and eat it in your car,” Fox said. “Now food is becoming much more of an experience, with [ethnic] food trucks and people Instagramming pictures of their food and 150 chefs having their television programs. Food has become culture, and chefs are now rock stars.
“But most brands are not changing as fast as culture is changing around them. Taco Bell was very astute in realizing that culture is changing, and they needed to change with it and have now repositioned themselves with ‘Live Más,’ which is a much more emotional standpoint of what they want their brand to be as opposed to the tagline, ‘Think outside of bun,’ which was much more functionally based. …”
Shift
Collider’s founders are also poised to fit in with a shift in their own industry.
Fox said advertising agencies are drifting away from the “one-stop shop” approach and focusing on delivering better creative ads, while others are providing accompanying marketing services a la carte, including media planning and buying.
The colleagues noticed a void that could be filled by a cultural and strategic agency such as theirs that focuses on “early-stage positioning, strategy, business work with the client” that precedes ad development.
Traditional media planning focuses on selecting the best media platforms for a client’s product, such as digital, TV or print, they said, but Collider will specialize in early “high-level brand architecture” that affects all aspects of the brand, including product development and the in-store experience.
“Advertising agencies are focusing on, ‘Hey, how do we come up with the great creative idea?’ ” Muench said. “But that does not help companies figure out the rest of the consumer experience or the direction of the company, and that’s why [our] solution is interesting.”
