Living your brand as a village

In one day in 2008, we moved all agency personnel out of their traditional departmental clusters and grouped them in pods based on the brands or industry categories they work on most often together. Hence, “brand villages.” No more media, creative, account service and digital “departments” – but multi-disciplinary mini-communities charged with the collective daily responsibility for researching, planning, growing and living the brands they’ve been assigned.

Today, you will find “villages” throughout our building, each populated by the writers, art directors, account managers, media planners/buyers and digital specialists who work on specific assignments together. This means that every brand we work on possesses a handpicked cadre of the experts needed to do truly remarkable work for that brand – and from the beginning, those experts collaborate laterally to ensure brand creativity informed by a full range of skills and experience.

What’s most revolutionary about this new agency structure is that our clients are also active members of these brand villages. They are our “co-conspirators” in managing and instigating change for their brands. The product of this more informal and collaborative relationship is the kind of business insight, creative problem-solving and swift results that have become the trademark of BOHAN work.

BOHAN’s brand village concept has also become something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, attracting clients who like the idea of openly sharing information and ideas and working shoulder to shoulder with their agency partner for the benefit of their brands. Those who are not as interested in playing together in our village sandbox at the highest level of mutual purpose, innovation and business ethics tend to choose more traditional and expected agency options.

The advertising and marketing industry has also taken notice. Our “village” model and planning discipline has been profiled in a white paper posted internationally by the World Advertising Research Center (WARC) in the U.K. And it has been hailed by the American Association of Advertising Agencies as “the agency model of the future.”