In the world of online advertising agencies, Marty Weiss is a true veteran: a seasoned executive, designer and art director, he’s morphing his latest venture (Meter Industries) into a new agency based in New York called “Marty Weiss and Friends.”
An art director with a vision
This is the kind of art director other art directors aspire to be: in addition to Marty Weiss and Friends, his workplaces include Weis, Whitten, Carroll, Stagliano; Chiat/Day; TBWA/Chiat/Day and Weiss, Stagliano & Partners. So what’s with the new offering?
The clue’s in the title: Weiss aims to draw talent from a core group of industry people he’s familiar with – friends – and bring them together in bespoke teams to work on each individual assignment or project. In other words, he’ll be creating case-by-case collaborators.
Weiss thinks the new offering is more of an “ant-agency”, describing his new firm as more of a “big hugging company” than a big holding company. And he’s already assembled a glittering list of collaborative friends, which now includes names from strong agencies such as Megan Kent (agency experience: Starfish, JWT, and Bouchez Kent), Jon Bond (agency experience: Big Fuel and Kirshenbaum, Bond & Partners) and Lance Porigow (agency experience: Profero).
A new trend in Adland?
And the roster’s pretty impressive, too, with “friends” like Thinkers and Makers, Skimatics Web Works and JSC Consumer Insights. Megan Kent describes Weiss’s approach as the creation of a “merry band of all-stars” who have accrued abundant experience of online advertising agencies.
This is actually becoming a trend: as Jon Bond explained, Weiss’ new project reflects how much looser the advertising business is becoming. He’s planning to work with Weiss on entrepreneurial ventures, an area he’s accumulated vast expertise in via his own firm, Tomorrow L.L.C.
The model appears to be going down well with Weiss’s longstanding clients, not least because he’s inspired their confidence: Chester Brands, CEO and President of Imperial Brandes, said, “The key to the success of our campaign is really Marty.”
He went on:
“Having worked with a number of big agencies, what that proved to me is that you don’t need a big agency and a team of 40 people to get brilliant creative.”