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Last year, Pereira O’Dell (POD) employees evaluated the agency’s marketing tactics as though it were one of their clients, and concluded that it needed to reorganize. Aiming to unify the agency’s external messaging, POD leaders merged its new business, public relations and talent teams, incentivizing each group to work toward a common goal.
POD leaders introduced a new structural model that they’re now crediting with recent strong success in winning business. Just this year, the shop brought on seven new clients, including the men’s grooming brand Manscaped, Simplisafe and Sunny D. Five of the seven signed on in January alone.
The agency’s growth offers peers a masterclass on how agencies can approach their own branding tactics. It was neither a rebrand nor a marketing campaign driving the results. The strategy was more straightforward than that, and came down to consistent messaging. Combining the previously disparate groups under a new chief growth officer, Mona Munayyer Gonzalez, helped practices understand how to support each other’s common goals.
Now, POD has found its voice and begun communicating consistently with the media, pitch consultants, and prospective clients and employees. POD’s competitive advantage, according to Munayyer Gonzalez, is its categorization. It’s a mid-sized independent with a 15-year history—one in a relatively small class of shops that regularly compete with holding company networks.
“Growth is defined a bazillion different ways. We are relentlessly focused on defining it as growth of the people and growth of the business. They are co-pilots in the same plane,” she said. “That meant basically taking new business, marketing, PR—but also our talent experience—and bringing it all together as just ‘growth.'”
Combining adjacent practices
Other agencies might find it odd to combine talent acquisition with PR and new business strategy. The structure helps recruiters understand staffing needs for prospective accounts, and properly utilizes the in-house PR team to draw positive attention to its employees. Then, POD can better leverage those employees during new business pitches.
Striking down the business silos helped the agency chase the same goals, avoiding the mistake of chasing new business at the expense of employees and morale.
Before undergoing these structural changes, leadership interviewed employees, existing and prospective clients, journalists and consultants, to find out whether the agency’s external messaging had resonated with them. The agency developed a brand architecture and named its previous chief creative officer, Robert Lambrechts, its chief strategy officer. Jason Apaliski, formerly executive creative director, stepped into the CCO job.
The agency gathered a few internal statistics to measure its progress and pinpoint focus areas. Honing its messaging increased its press coverage from 10 articles in early 2023 to 78 during the same period this year. The agency’s internal survey also yielded mostly positive results, with employees rating the shop highly for statements like “management genuinely cares about my wellbeing” and “management keeps me informed about what is happening at the agency.”
“Suddenly, the importance of understanding the agency brand, and how it’s different than the hundreds of other agencies out there, became much more critically important,” Munayyer Gonzalez said.
The agency does large brand campaigns for its clients, including creative for the Las Vegas Sphere. Its work for automotive brand Mini—an account it won in 2017—appeared there.
Behind the Manscaped win
For Manscaped CMO Marcelo Kertesz, Pereira O’Dell felt like the right creative match. As a creative, Kertesz has worked on political campaigns in various countries, moving to the U.S. from Brazil about a decade ago. Now at Manscaped, he runs creative, product design and even packaging.
“The fact that we inaugurated a category was a very good foundation to begin [with], because it showed our true commitment to men,” Kertesz said.
“As a DTC-first company, there are moments where we need bigger pivots, bigger changes. That’s what we are inaugurating with this campaign right now,” he said of the brand’s newest work, “The Boys.” The campaign leans into what the CMO calls “unpretentious and entertaining humor.” The CMO is focused on attention to detail, making sure that humor and voice are reflected even in the product’s packaging.
When Kertesz joined the brand, he also assumed leadership of its in-house creative team. “Under the same leadership we had product design, packaging, digital content, advertising—so we had a very collaborative and cohesive brand,” he said.
Eventually he craved an outside perspective, hoping to rebalance Manscaped’s marketing mix and place more emphasis on branding. POD resonated with the CMO, who realized the two brands were on a similar growth trajectory.
“When they brought that idea to us… the campaign that we just launched, ‘The Boys,’ it was sold in one frame,” he said. “My comment was, in my four years at Manscaped, this is the funniest frame I’ve ever seen because it was one that spoke volumes.” Before it found POD, Kertesz outsourced occasional projects to agencies, but now has a consistent partner in POD.
“It’s kind of one of those a-ha moments that’s so hard to pin [down] when you’re working with creative, because there is a level of subjectivity,” he said. Other agencies took similar approaches that also resonated, he said, but there was strong chemistry between his team and POD’s, and the creative concept that became “The Boys” was a standout.
“Pereira O’Dell sees us as a huge opportunity, as we see them as an opportunity for us. I think that usually helps a lot, because it puts a lot of energy in the right direction,” he said.
