Top 10 Fastest Growing Agencies by Percent Change in Revenue

Growth can come from the most unexpected places. But what endures is a relentless focus on the future. Adweek’s top 10 Fastest Growing agencies based on revenue have unique stories of success that anyone can learn from. Here are the top 10 fastest growing agencies by percent change in revenue. (Be sure to check out Adweek's top 100 Fastest Growing agencies and 10 solution providers for the complete list.) 1. Highdive HQ: Chicago Growth: 2,100% Select Clients: Boost Mobile, Jeep, Rocket Mortgage Classification: Full-Service Some of the country’s biggest, most lauded agencies go years without creating a Super Bowl commercial. Which makes it all the more remarkable that Highdive, a 30-person boutique agency founded four years ago, managed to snag two Super Bowl spots this year. Highdive was founded in 2016 by Chad Broude and Mark Gross, who left their creative posts at DDB Chicago to try something new. The two had worked on some of DDB’s biggest accounts, including Bud Light and Capital One. “Chad and I are both creatives, and we wanted to start our own thing and do the kind of work we wanted to do,” Gross says. They soon linked up with Megan Lally and Louis Slotkin, both of whom had recently left Leo Burnett to focus on improving account management in the industry. Lally previously worked at DDB with Broude and Gross, so the four of them agreed to join forces and began collaborating on projects. “It’s been a winning recipe ever since,” says Broude. Highdive hit the ground running after its formation, creating campaigns for Barilla, Nike and Hotel EMC2, a Marriott property, but 2020 has been its biggest year yet. Jeep and Boost Mobile have named Highdive agency of record in the past year, with Jeep entrusting the shop with a Super Bowl ad starring Bill Murray in which he reprises the role of Phil Connors from the movie Groundhog Day. The ad came together at the last minute and was shot just days before the Big Game—yet still managed to land the top spot on USA Today’s coveted Super Bowl Ad Meter. The commercial was also nominated for an Emmy. Rocket Mortgage, too, tapped Highdive to create its Super Bowl ad. The spot featured actor Jason Momoa hilariously shedding his sculpted physique for a lankier (and balding) one. “In many ways, it’s been the biggest year of our careers,” Slotkin says. The agency isn’t showing any signs of slowing down, either. According to Lally, Highdive was named creative agency of record for three brands recently, all while working from home. Gross says Highdive’s next goal is to win a gold Lion at Cannes. “We want to build an outstanding creative portfolio,” he says. “We want to reach high.” So what’s Highdive’s secret? Slotkin says everything it does is rooted in its mission, which is to “create the healthiest client-agency relationships in the world.” “It guides everything that we do,” he explains. “When relationships are healthy, those are the moments where creativity really can flourish.” Gross agrees: “Our clients like the relationship and how we treat them. The work we’re doing is being received well. Our employees are happy. We’re very proud that what we set out to do is working.” —Minda Smiley 2. Traffic Builders HQ: Bayville, N.J. Growth: 1,997% Select Clients: Draper Media (Delaware), Gray Television, Pepsi Frontline Careers Classification: Digital Traffic Builders was founded in 2013 as the in-house agency of a “large TV group,” according to its CEO Tim Burke. As the company continued to grow, so did Traffic Builders. “We had to grow right with them,” Burke says. “Almost expressly, for the first six years, we were just working with TV stations.” That changed a few years ago when Burke established Conduit Digital, a division of Traffic Builders focused on helping ad agencies with their digital chops. Instead of building out a digital offering internally to handle things like SEO and website development, agencies can hire Conduit instead. It essentially operates as an agency within an agency. “Conduit is really the division which is really going to become larger than anything else that we’re doing,” Burke says. “We’re the ad agency that powers other agencies’ digital performance.” Its offerings assist brands in a variety of ways. For instance, Conduit helped an HVAC client increase its organic traffic 140% year over year by revamping the company’s content and keyword strategy. Conduit also recently set up a programmatic display campaign for an automotive maintenance client to help increase brand awareness. The agency was forced to shift the campaign’s strategy once Covid-19 hit, which involved changing the messaging in the ads. According to Conduit, the campaign resulted in more than 150 website visits to schedule a service appointment. The client ended up expanding its marketing efforts to another location after seeing the results. Conduit currently operates in the U.S., but it’s setting its sights internationally. Burke says he’s recently had calls with agencies in Amsterdam, Australia and Canada. “Working with ad agency owners is really where the spirit of our agency is,” Burke says. “Advertising agency owners are drivers, and they’re ambitious. It is so much fun to work with them.” —M.S. 3. Stadiumred Group HQ: New YorkGrowth: 1,619%Select Clients: 7-Eleven, Disney (ABC and Fox), FX NetworksClassification: Full-Service Claude Zdanow, group CEO of Stadiumred, doesn’t have a traditional agency background. He previously ran a recording studio, where he discovered his passion for branding. “I kind of fell into the advertising and marketing world by way of the music industry,” he says. Zdanow has spent the past few years building Stadiumred, a collective of five agencies, each with a specific focus. Together, the shops he’s acquired offer branding, experiential, content, digital and influencer services to clients. “We’ve been very fortunate because of our diversified portfolio,” Zdanow says. “We’ve really been able to stand the test of time through a tough year.” Stadiumred’s clients include 7-Eleven, FX Networks and Singani 63, a liquor brand owned by director Steven Soderbergh. Roughly 70 people work across its offices in New York, Los Angeles, Nashville, Miami and Amsterdam. This summer, Stadiumred’s experiential agency, Creative Riff, helped FX Networks stage a digital activation for Comic-Con, which took place virtually this year. The agency worked with FX Networks to create interactive games, talks and workshops for fans of shows like What We Do in the Shadows and Archer. Zdanow says Stadiumred’s other agencies chipped in to bring it all to life. “We were able to leverage our other agencies and come together as a group to build an immersive experience,” Zdanow says. “It was a huge point in the year to us.” According to Zdanow, Stadiumred’s structure has helped the agency collective “fare better than many other agencies in this current time.” It’s an approach he says lets the owners of each individual agency “do what they do best, which is focus on the clients and the work.” —M.S. 4. Mamag HQ: Los AngelesGrowth: 1,405%Select Clients: Adidas, Amazon, GoogleClassification: Creative Mamag grew out of frustration with systemic racism in the ad industry and began with a false identity. Founder and CEO Sylvia Zakhary started the agency and production studio out of her New York apartment. Frustrated with lukewarm responses to her initial pitches, she spent a year pretending to be a white man named Keith Morris. “A lot of people I thought I had a relationship with didn’t respond, rejected me or were passive-aggressive,” she says. “When I would literally copy and paste, but now coming from Keith, responses changed. There was still some rejection, but it was way more polite.” After about a year, Zakhary decided to start using her own name. Since then, Mamag has expanded into Mamag Group, which includes Mamag Studios along with six other subsidiaries, all of which are owned, operated or led by people of color. Zakhary says Mamag stands out because its employees all come from outside advertising with backgrounds in film, TV and music. “That’s really been able to help us ideate in such a unique way. We’re not jaded by the industry, and we’re able to think outside of the box and holistically,” Zakhary says. Mamag’s key clients include Adidas, Amazon Music, Google Pixel and Donald Glover Presents, the creative partnership between Donald Glover and Adidas Originals. Sing J. Lee, who also happens to be Zakhary’s husband, has been CCO at Mamag Studios for the past three years. “He really pushes the messaging to a whole other level and really pushes our clients to think differently,” Zakhary says. In the coming year, Mamag plans to further its production capabilities with work on its first feature. “Commercial spaces are moving toward a longer format as well,” Zakhary says. “We’re excited to move to the forefront of that.” —Erik Oster 5. Arts & Letters Creative Co. HQ: Richmond, Va.Growth: 1,271%Select Clients: ESPN, Google, NBC NewsClassification: Creative Growth was never really the goal for Arts & Letters. Founder and ecd Charles Hodges tells Adweek he founded the shop in an attempt to build his career around his life, thinking it would be a creative studio producing a few projects a year. When Arts & Letters leased its first office location, Hodges envisioned a team of eight to 10 people. He says one of the first things they did was write, “We’ll figure it out” on the wall. And figure it out they did. From there, Arts & Letters evolved (with growth very much in the cards) and proved extremely relevant to both clients and creatives, providing the former with a creative partner and the latter with the ability to work with flexibility. “Today, we really think we’re a vertically integrated creative company,” Hodges explains. “We’ve combined strategic rigor and conceptual ability with the speed of a modern production studio.” Arts & Letters produces the majority of its work in-house while also bringing in select production partners on certain projects. The agency has continued to grow, even during the pandemic, adding 30 employees remotely to swell its ranks to 130. Arts & Letters' client roster has included Google, ESPN and NBC News, for which the agency worked on a recent “Plan Your Vote” campaign. “What Covid taught us was that an agency isn’t a building or process,” Hodges says. “It’s a group of people that believe in each other and clients that believe in those people. We don’t take each other, a single opportunity or anything for granted.” Arts & Letters' future still does not involve ambitious growth plans. “We’re 130 people. I hope in five years we’re 133 people,” Hodges says. “Growth was never the goal; it was a result of focusing on partnerships.” —E.O. 6. RingoFire HQ: Greenville, S.C.Growth: 1,070%Select Clients: AO Smith, Greenworks Tools, Serta Simmons BeddingClassification: Full-Service RingoFire made a decision early on to focus on hardware and home improvement brands, which comprise around 85%-95% of the agency’s clients. That decision helped RingoFire continue to grow as most categories saw a decline in spending while Americans stuck at home took to home improvement projects. Since 2017, RingoFire has grown from a couple employees operating out of an apartment to 36 staffers, including six new additions over the past six months. Founder and CEO Brian Stearns attributes RingoFire’s success to its willingness to do everything from concepting to production in-house and its focus on business results and turning around projects that drive ROI quickly. “Obviously, we want to have incredible creative,” vp, business operations Richard Carrizales says, “but at the end of the day, if the clients aren’t selling more products, we’re not doing our jobs. We never focused on Cannes Lions and Addys. We focused on driving sales.” The agency helped Greenworks Tools, for example, go from little-known competitor to the fastest growing brand on social within two months, Stearns says. While the pandemic forced RingoFire to find innovative ways to deliver results on reduced budgets, the agency’s focus on ecommerce and the home improvement category allowed it to weather the crisis. CCO Todd Johnston says that since its inception, the agency was able to “achieve quality creative that was affordable but didn’t come across as lackluster” and convince brands that hadn’t pursued such marketing before that it was a worthwhile investment. Stearns says the agency would like to work with more global brands but is also investing in product development. “Our dream client would be our own brand,” he says. —E.O. 7. Superbolt HQ: New YorkGrowth: 1,061%Select Clients: Antares, By Humankind, Studs (earrings)Classification: Full-Service Superbolt’s founders built the agency they wanted to see when they were client-side marketers. The agency grew out of a DTC company called Try The World, where founder, CEO Vincent Bourzeix served as CMO. “We wanted to hire agencies that could have core efficiencies in one place,” Bourzeix tells Adweek. In 2017, Superbolt launched with the goal of providing everything clients needed to drive value. Superbolt’s service offerings include everything from strategy and creative execution to postproduction, data and analytics. Superbolt has grown to a team of 48 and has new offices in Paris and Los Angeles. While it focuses on working with brands that have yet to launch, Superbolt has more recently gotten additional attention from larger, established brands, founding partner Diya Varadaraj explains. Some recent examples include Brazilian body works brand Natura and Antares, the legacy software company behind Auto-Tune. Superbolt was hit hard when the coronavirus pandemic started spreading across the country, losing 30% of its revenue “overnight,” according to Bourzeix. But the agency was able to recover in the months that followed, he explains, growing 9% month over month for a net positive growth on the year. In fact, August was its best month ever in terms of growth. “We have a plan to continue to grow sustainably and organically,” Bourzeix says, with an eye on becoming more of a challenger to legacy agencies. “We think the methodology of the agencies isn’t relevant for a lot of brands.” Superbolt also has a leg up on legacy shops in creating a diverse and inclusive work environment, Varadaraj says, pointing out that two of the agency’s founders are immigrants and its workforce is 65% women. “We’ve always looked at, ‘How do we make it easier for people from many backgrounds to be successful?’” she says, acknowledging Superbolt still has work to do in the area. —E.O. 8. Passerine HQ: Los AngelesGrowth: 1,059%Select Clients: Jordan Brand, The Movement for Black Lives, NetflixClassification: Creative While some agencies struggle to define their offerings, Los Angeles-based Passerine has no such issue. The hybrid creative agency and production company knows what it takes to create elite-level storytelling. Co-founders Shalonda Cornitcher and Adam Tillman-Young come from creative backgrounds (both went to film school and Cornitcher is a musician and Tillman-Young a photographer). Neither had experience or education in advertising but, according to Cornitcher, the duo “wanted to see if we could build something beautiful that could bring some of our filmmaking desires to life.” After working on several music videos, Passerine landed an opportunity with Jordan Brand, working on high-profile projects. In 2019, the agency brought strategy, development and production skills to "Unite," Jordan Brand’s new global campaign, with work featuring young NBA star Zion Williamson. It also kicked off Jordan Brand’s first $1 billion fiscal quarter. Very much a family affair (all of Passerine’s staff are family members), the Black-owned agency created a moving “suite of joy-centered content” for The Movement for Black Lives. The goal was to document the beauty of diverse communities coming together in the wake of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. “We’ve always been grounded in the commitment, making sure that we’re creating images that are true, real and feel good for us,” notes Cornitcher. That effort extends to the totality of the work, including supporting the community, including providing free therapy for Black creatives. “Every aspect of our process is inclusive,” says Tillman-Young. The next step in Passerine’s growth is to carve out more opportunities in original content for the entertainment business. —Doug Zanger 9. Thesis HQ: Brooklyn, N.Y.Growth: 996%Select Clients: Lennar, Nuts.com, Renewal by AndersenClassification: Digital Digital shop Thesis is all about optimization. The agency uses a proprietary platform to build and supercharge growth for clients. According to Thesis founder Adam Lovallo, 80%-90% of the agency’s business is in the DTC space, but it also works with legacy brands like Lennar and Renewal by Andersen. “Almost all DTC brands are crushing it right now,” Lovallo says, referring to consumer behavior moving toward subscription and direct-based companies. “We’re in that slipstream.” For Lovallo, it’s all about conversion rates and finding ways to become more efficient with client budgets. Over half of Thesis’ team members are in technical roles, and Lovallo believes the trend of automated media buying is a genie that can’t be put back into the bottle. “Media buying in and of itself is already largely automated and will continue to get further automated. Facebook and Google and even TikTok mostly run autopilot,” he says. Creative, however, is the X-factor Lovallo believes makes the most significant difference. “Our clients and prospective clients think about creative a lot,” he says. “That’s good and probably the biggest lever, but there’s very little done on the conversion-rate-optimization side. There’s opportunity to move people up the [sales] funnel [through optimization].” Thesis’ growth comes from what would seem like some unexpected places. A newsletter, Grow.co, with around 15,000 subscribers, and MAU Vegas, a 2,500-plus in-person conference, have helped build the shop’s network quickly—and breaks it out from the sea of sameness among agencies. —D.Z. 10. SourceCode Communications HQ: New YorkGrowth: 944%Select Clients: Clio, Everlast, Seated (app)Classification: Strategic Communications SourceCode Communications sees the benefit in telling a good story. It has spent the past six months honing its proprietary StoryHub platform, which helps plan, inform and design stories for its clients. “I would say that we are a storytelling agency,” says SourceCode co-founder Rebecca Honeyman. “This doesn’t limit you to one channel or any one kind of capability. It’s about creating an emotional reaction in your audience.” One campaign that stands out for co-founder Greg Mondshein was for iconic boxing brand Everlast. With the rise of boutique fitness and the brand’s desire to be more relevant, the 3-year-old agency landed on a campaign targeting millennials that featured transgender boxer Patricio Manuel. “It wasn’t an expensive campaign, but it was risky,” says Mondshein. “The visibility and coverage was huge but, most importantly, the feedback from their constituents was overwhelmingly positive.” Founded as more of a PR firm—SourceCode has won several industry awards in its short time in existence—the agency added more creative and strategy, but leaned into its strengths for restaurant awards app Seated. As Covid-19 halted in-person dining, Honeyman and Mondshein managed to keep the brand top of mind through media placements and interviews with its executives. SourceCode’s growth is a hybrid. Some of the agency’s new business has come from referrals, but a significant positive has been that its long-standing clients (an estimated 71% of the roster) have increased their budgets. “A lot of what we do is dictated by our client needs,” says Mondshein. “And that often helps us understand where we should go as an agency.” —D.Z.

Fastest Growing Marketing Agencies

Top 10 Fastest Growing Agencies by Percent Change in Revenue

These shops topped our second annual global rankings

1. Highdive

Doug Zanger

Minda Smiley

Erik Oster

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