One of the most amazing and wonderful things in the last couple of years here at Victors & Spoils has been dynamic tension that’s been created between being an advertising agency and a tech start-up. That tension that’s been created by mashing up the two cultures has been profound for me.
When we started we noticed that even the most tech-based agencies were analogue at their core. We asked ourselves a couple of questions. First, what would happen if we took the functions of a typical ad agency and digitized them? The way we communicate. How we work in a massively distributed way across the globe. Hence, we created Agency Machine. Taking an analogue business process and making it digital is a messy affair, full of trials and errors. All said, it’s working pretty darn well and gives us the ability to scale globally and rapidly.
Next we thought about what we could build for our clients. It’s something that has intrigued me for a while, and was an inspiration for Alex Bogusky and me to write Baked-In. Lot’s of agencies talk about building their own IP but their own structure gets in the way. Forty percent of the Victors & Spoils team is here to build proprietary technology. We feel it’s the only way to go beyond just building campaigns for clients to building platforms that scale across media and can be massively scalable. Yesterday we launched our second tech product, Fan Machine, working with Harley-Davidson as our launch client. Mark-Hans Richer, Dino Bernnachi and their team at Harley-Davidson have been great partners in exploring ways to shift the paradigm of how advertising is created. We want to make the experience better for creatives, customers and brands by cutting out fat and facilitating faster, deeper conversations between brands, consumers and creatives.
Agency Machine and Fan Machine are just the start of what we’re building. It’s not just about creating great work, it’s also about building the digital tools to change the way campaigns are born and executed.