- The Hidden Gems: Uncovered
- Posts
- Free AWNY Tickets | Make a *Deel* with Snoop | Pepsi's Media Shakeup | Man Living in a Billboard
Free AWNY Tickets | Make a *Deel* with Snoop | Pepsi's Media Shakeup | Man Living in a Billboard
The Hidden Gems Newsletter
Welcome to The Hidden Gems Monthly Randomly timed Newsletter
One month between issues. Nobody is more surprised than me.
For more information on what The Hidden Gems is: Click here to unveil the person behind it, and click here to get a fun “explainer” on us. If you work in advertising, production, marketing, creative, media, experiential, digital, product, or some funky combination - we welcome you to stick around.
Quick one before we start: I have free Advertising Week New York tickets and I want to give them to you. Ask me for the link… that’s it!
What’s (un)covered in this newsletter?
Why an old man’s backside is the best ad of the summer
The guy who lived in a Netflix billboard on Sunset
Pepsi’s global media just changed hands after 20+ years
Agency Drama: WPP Production wants to hand you all 3 of your 3 bids
Plus 1,000 more WPP job cuts, a whistleblower suit, and one shop that bought itself back
Free Advertising Week New York (AWNY) tickets
Newly Uncovered: who our Gems have been working with
Philosophical Musing: the days are long, the decades are short
Now, on with the show
Wish I Thought Of That
Brilliant new work
A sunscreen brand built a whole campaign around your grandfather’s backside. PASTY MAN makes sunscreen for men & their pitch is The 90 Year Old Butt Theory: the skin that never saw the sun still looks 40 years younger than the face that did.
This ad proves the best creative comes from a great insight, and I think these guys will become the Liquid Death of sunscreen.
Netflix put a man inside a billboard on Sunset for 3 days. 30 feet up, fake front door, a living room, and a dude actually living in it. For The Last House, isolation is the point of the movie. The Hollywood Reporter first broke the story, and here’s my take on it.
Deel says 200,000 people applied for a job with Snoop Dogg. Dr. Bombay is hiring an International Ice-Cream Taster. $10k/month for 3 months, open to anyone on earth, taste & travel & report back to Snoop, who calls the winner himself. Applications close September 18th! NBC News confirmed it’s a real job. 😂
If you sell something unglamorous, this is the move. Don’t just explain the product. Use it in… and tie it to something clever!
Love the LinkedIn-like website too. I do wonder if they got LinkedIn’s blessing.
The best B2B software ad of the year was made by one person. Puno made it for Adobe Acrobat. The joke is client feedback.
Adobe let the person who lives that pain every day make the comical ad. Half the time the best ad comes from a real user who knows how to create.
Dyson made a toothbrush with a camera in it. The CameraJet landed September 1st. A 100,000-pixel lens finds the gaps between your teeth and fires mouthwash into them. Dezeen has the teardown. The launch film is worth 2 minutes.
Dyson has run the same play for 30 years… take a category nobody thinks about and over-engineer it. Vacuums, fans, hairdryers… now your molars. Every category has something this boring waiting for the same treatment!
Vibe.co shot their ad like a pharmaceutical commercial. The spot promises to regulate your funnel, with side effects that include exceeding your KPIs. CEO Arthur Querou posted it and the comments started treating Vibe like a yogurt, asking if you can buy it at Walmart.
Then Walmart actually bought them on August 4th. The comment section called it weeks early! 🤔
OpenAI put 2 grandmothers in front of ChatGPT Voice and just let them talk to it. Ad Age has the campaign. This whole category has spent 3 years selling to 28-year-old engineers. Smartest thing OpenAI has done on the brand side.
Somebody put a giant hairball in New York. K18 did it, and for a week the whole city couldn’t stop asking what it was.
Physical, weird, and cheap next to a media buy with the same reach!
Liquid Death and Garage Beer want you to cool AI data centers with your urine. I have no notes. 😂
4 of those 9 are software companies. Deel, Adobe, Vibe and OpenAI all made something a normal human would actually watch. Software has quietly become the most interesting category in advertising… which lines up suspiciously well with what’s been landing on my desk lately. More on that below.
Agency Drama
August into September
The big one. Publicis took PepsiCo’s global media. 200+ markets. Pepsi, Gatorade, Lay’s. That ends 20+ years of Omnicom’s OMD running it in the US & UK.
There was NO pitch. Publicis got appointed off a review of media & technology capabilities. The biggest media account on the board changed hands with no chemistry meeting, no creds deck, no beauty parade. If you’ve built your business on winning pitches… read that twice!
Publicis then walked out of the Coca-Cola global media pitch that same week. Omnicom keeps creative, sports and PR, and PepsiCo still has a separate AI transformation review running. Second act coming. 🤔
And this one hits closer to home. WPP Production told staff to steer clients off competitive bidding. Per the internal document Campaign obtained, when a client asks for 3 quotes, staff should “evaluate if WPP Production can provide all three bids internally.”
So that’s 3 “competing” bids, from 1 org. LinkedIn lit up, and production people almost never complain (…in public). WPP says it holds to transparent processes & its client contracts.
This is exactly what we solve for. Triple bidding exists to show you a real range… 3 studios, 3 numbers. When all 3 come out of the same building, that’s not healthy competition!
Our friends at Adweak (Yes that’s the spelling!) were funny as always, with their take on the matter.
WPP is also cutting up to 1,000 more jobs by year end. Ad Age has it. That’s past 11,000 since early 2025, under Cindy Rose’s Elevate28 program. Ogilvy, VML and AKQA all get folded under one WPP Creative umbrella with Jon Cook running it.
And then it got worse. New claims in the WPP whistleblower suit allege an internal Sony probe found rebate fraud. Adweek broke it. Media transparency was supposed to be settled 10 years ago. Yikes.
Omnicom quietly handed off the people who built its AI platform. Hundreds of engineers & product staff moved over to a third-party IT contractor. Losing Pepsi media on a technology review in the same window is a rough pair of headlines. They also merged Hearts & Science and Mediahub into Hearts United.
My favorite story of the month goes the complete other direction. L&C bought their independence back, repurchasing Serviceplan Group’s stake. Everybody covers the exit. Almost nobody covers the shop that wants the keys back!
Indies merging with indies: Bastion USA and BUNTIN combined into one global independent, and Worldwide Partners added 10 new independent partners. Scale without a holdco. Keep an eye on this model.
And people keep starting new ones. Frank Cartagena launched OK Future. JERi opened as a creator agency that actually puts talent on the advisory board. Patrick Patrick launched into entertainment marketing.
Meanwhile the small shops keep taking the real accounts. Dollar Tree named Tombras its first-ever creative AOR. Turtlebox Audio gave McGarrah Jessee its first. Kate’s Real Food went to Pinnacle. A first-ever AOR is the best brief in this business, because nothing has calcified yet.
Newly Uncovered
Brands served since the last issue
From BIG to small, here’s some of who our Hidden Gems have been working with lately. We can’t share the work publicly, but ask me and I’ll tell you what went down.
General Electric (Industrial), Qualcomm (Tech), Sanofi (Pharma), Horizon Media (Media), Certinia (Enterprise Software), Datasite (Deal Tech), Octonomy (AI)… and more.
4 of these are tech. It’s been a very TECH month over here, which tracks with what I’m hearing on calls… software companies have decided their own category is boring and they want out. B2B & Tech briefs are the most fun work in the building right now!
And here are our All Time Favorites from some Hidden Gems
Note: This only showcases creative-led work (Content, Experiential, Design) since it’s the most visibly flashy, but much much more goes on here. Curious about the teams behind any piece of work? The cost, timeline? Just ask!
What’s New at The Hidden Gems
I have free tickets to Advertising Week New York (AWNY), and I’d rather you have them. October 5-8, The Penn District. Just reply to this email & I’ll sort you out. No form, no code!
The guides are coming along. What to look for in an agency or production partner, by discipline and by industry. What to ask, the red flags, what things really cost and how long they really take. Free, and no email required!
Want the links early? Reply and I’ll send them.
Our people had a loud summer. Comic-Con builds, a World Cup activation inside adidas’ Home of Soccer, and a few things I still can’t talk about. If you ever wonder who could pull something like that off, that’s the whole reason I exist!
Philosophical Musing
Sam Altman once figured that by 23, life is basically half over. He meant how it feels, because time speeds up as you go.
Andrew Yeung picked that up on turning 31. Monotony compresses time. Novelty stretches it. A new route home, a new skill, a room full of people you don’t know yet. The days are long, but the decades are short.
Someone in his comments found the tension. Ambitious work needs routine, because that’s how anything compounds. Memory needs variety. Building a career and remembering it pull against each other!
Every brief you send to the same 3 shops is a Tuesday you won’t remember.
9 years from now, the campaigns you’ll still be telling stories about are the ones where you took a chance on someone and something new.
What the heck is “The Hidden Gems”?
The Hidden Gems was founded by David Drexler to solve for the frequent inefficiencies in the Advertising Agency & Production landscape. We believe that small/boutique partners give the biggest “bang for the buck”, care, and craft. Your most optimal partners have yet to be uncovered.
We are THE Agency & Production Matchmaker. The secret weapon of many marketers, creatives, experientialists, innovators, media mavens, and producers. When they seek recommendations on which external partners to consider for engagement… we provide them with incredible Hidden Gems worth considering, that are otherwise flying under their radar. Literally that simple. No paperwork nor transactions ever needed with The Hidden Gems itself.
Reach out to us at any time for questions, needs, inspiration, gutchecks… or a laugh.