Consulting Case Study:

North (Advertising)

IMMERSION LEARNING

I’ve been consulting with North off and on for over ten years now. At first it was quick hits, best practices presentations, pitch presentation outlines, and things like that. For the last year I have been North’s Fractional CMO, where I attend all new business meetings, assist crafting pitch strategies, RFP writing, and whatever else they need to win. Along the way I’d noticed (and North leadership did as well) that their work product was better than their communications about themselves. To be fair, I find this to be true with most agencies. But it’s the strong agency who can acknowledge this deficiency and actively address it. North is one such agency.

I was tasked with helping North find its, well, true North. As well as I knew them—particularly CEO Rebecca Armstrong and co-founder and CCO, Mark Ray—I didn’t know them from the inside nor from a client’s perspective. So I conducted nine one-on-one interviews with a combination of clients and North employees.

Key insights:

• North is musical. Many of their employees are professional musicians, so they are grounded in culture that way.

• Live passionately (beyond advertising). When hiring they look for people who are passionate about something in their lives.

• They all hate advertising. This is their motivation to make advertising they love.

• Non-gratuitous creative. One employee said, “We see the beauty in the way things are and amplify that.”

There were more findings, but those were the biggies. In short, I learned that North is a grounded, creative, musical, culturally tuned, hater of advertising.

Now, how do we turn all that into a single point-of-view?

THE IDEAS

I presented the above findings and tons of supporting quotes from the clients and employees and then dropped four brand ideas in the form of taglines on North’s leadership team. I’ve found clients are attracted to agencies who not only believe in something powerful, but are obsessed with it. So I pulled from the insights and wrote mini-manifestos to go with each idea so that the “obsessiveness” would come through, and not just the taglines.

Note: while I brought these ideas to North, keep in mind they’re not really my ideas. They are North’s ideas. They came, sometimes literally, from interview responses. What I’m good at is knowing a good idea when I see one and then slightly nudging it into conformity.

After some debate, though not much, the leadership team at North all agreed that “Real is beautiful” best captures their true spirit. It’s something they’ve been all along, just hadn’t articulated. To me, it gave the agency an attractive “obsession” that was not only 100% true, it would freshen up how they talked about themselves and the advertising they create.

And now the fun begins.

ACTIVATIONS

There’s no greater joy to me as a consultant than to see an agency (or any client) get excited about a brand idea. Their wheels immediately start turning, they start rattling off ideas inspired by the new idea, and then leverage the idea to unify their agency.

The “Real is beautiful” idea only rolled out in February of 2024, but here are some examples of recent activations:

New home page:

New blog:

Inaugural introductory blog post:

Excerpt: “We recently noticed something profound about ourselves at North. Something we’ve been doing for decades, but didn’t realize or otherwise articulate or seek credit for. It’s an undercurrent that has always inspired the creative work we do for brands, and also an insight that arguably comes out of our agency’s deep love for art, music, and culture in general…” click here for full post

Pitch materials: North’s pitch materials have completely transformed, are tighter, tell a compelling story, and even promote a new strategic process. Even when they’re talking about the same old stuff every agency has to talk about, it somehow feels fresh and different through the prism of “Real is beautiful.” Can’t share their pitch materials with you as they’re proprietary, but let me just say North is now projecting an image that matches their creative work product.

And more to come…

POSTSCRIPT:

North takes full advantage of Ideasicle X’s services:

• Brand idea - the above post covers that

• Subscriber to the Ideasicle X platform (read how they won the Ledlenser pitch using it)

• Fractional CMO - I attend all new biz meetings, help craft pitch-winning strategies, write presentation outlines, and various writings.