Upshot’s Smokin’!
When last we left the Agency Formerly Known As Promotional Marketing, Inc. (two years ago in a PROMO 100 profile), the feisty shop recrafted as Upshot (“a marketing agency”) was beginning to reap the rewards of a philosophical overhaul performed by its youthful new owners: ex-venture capitalist John Kelley and former package designer Carol Griseto. It had doubled its net revenue to $5 million in one year with assignments from blue-chip clients including Anheuser-Busch, Sony, and Coca-Cola, and ever-energetic and optimistic ceo Kelley forecast continued triple-digit growth – no matter that the brownstone in Chicago’s River North district that housed his operation had just burned down.
His enthusiasm, it is now plain, was well-founded. Upshot is still a house afire, but a much bigger house. Its creative yet on-strategy work for Surge and Coke’s contour bottle delivered it to lead-agency status on Coke Classic, Diet Coke, and Sprite. An on-premise campaign Upshot orchestrated for Absolut Kurant had such a resuscitating effect on the flagging flavor that Seagram execs yearned for more. So Upshot bought Seagram agency of record Siebel Marketing (assist Ha-Lo, which acquired Upshot in ’98), and now directs promos for nearly all the company’s liquor brands. And new clients, like Discover Card last month, continue to line up. Net revenue topped $23 million last year, making the agency No. 2 in the PROMO 100.
Upshot is simply the hottest, hippest, brand-building-est, strategizing-est promotion shop now lurking the landscape. “We’re no longer Upshot the boutique,” proclaims Kelley. “We’re Upshot the player.”
Clients find themselves forced to agree. “Many agencies are project-driven, but Upshot makes the effort to understand the client, the brands, and the business,” says Seagram evp-global marketing Arthur Shapiro. “Intelligence is their key. They’re smart, young, and aggressive.”
“Upshot is both strategic and creative. They push the envelope, but they remain aware of the system constraints,” says Coca-Cola USA agency manager Liza Buczkowski. “A lot of that comes from their understanding of our process and our brand. I’d love to know what process they use.”
Doubtless it’s one based on fastidiousness born of fear of failure. “Our highest commitment is to, ‘What does the client want? What does the market need?'” says the 37-year-old Kelley. “When we were relaunching the agency in ’94, Sergio Zyman of Coke had made a statement that agencies needed to be entrepreneurial, that Coke wasn’t interested in agencies of record, but the biggest, hottest ideas. That has since been on our minds. We’ve been paranoid about the needs of every client. Even if we’re the agency of record, we don’t treat the relationship that way, because others are coming in with new ideas.”
Upshot’s own penchant for creative idea-generation harks back, thinks Griseto, to the agency’s formative stages. “Back in the PMI days, one of our biggest clients was RJR, and tobacco was a great training ground because it’s so restrictive that everything we did had to be different,” says the 44-year-old chief management officer. “John and I didn’t have the traditional agency background, so we didn’t know the rules.”
Nor did other key personnel such as account management chief Jeff Davidoff, 35, who came out of banking, or creative services manager Jim Dygas, 34, ex-creative director for a giftware cataloger. “I didn’t know what a violator was or how big the win copy should be,” says Dygas.
Recalls Griseto: “We came up with some pretty different ideas.”
