As media and creative silos collapse, Bakery–the Austin-based independent creative shop–has launched a media agency. The new shop is called KEN Media—and Bakery leaders tapped Molly Lochridge, a media expert with a strong grasp on the Austin market, to lead it as media director.
While KEN and Bakery are technically separate companies, the new media agency is fully integrated with Bakery’s ethos and culture. The agencies’ offices will soon be located on different floors of the same building.
Bakery founder Micky Ogando launched KEN to bridge the gap between media and creative and deliver more to Bakery clients. It’s now working on media for some of those clients, including Shiner and Diageo. Despite this, KEN doesn’t aim for AOR relationships, or to take business away from its clients’ larger media agency partners. Instead, Ogando believes clients will view it the same way they view Bakery–as an outside-of-the-box shop that delivers unique solutions.
The media agency’s name is a take on the word “ken,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “the range of vision.”
Lochridge comes to KEN with 15 years’ experience at agencies including OMD and Third Ear. She also has a deep understanding of ad sales, gleaned from a prior role at the publisher IGN Entertainment.
Although she was media-minded and loved working with data, she always had an appreciation for creative work, Lochridge told Adweek. “There’s still a ton of creativity involved [in media], she said. Because of all the targeting and the customization that you can do—and the work with the different partnerships.”
Before joining KEN, Lochridge was a media sales and marketing executive at Miles Partnership, working on the Visit Austin brand. Her former clients also included Universal Pictures, Clorox and the Texas Lottery.
Media industry leaders often talk about why it’s necessary to include media agencies in early campaign planning. As a small creative shop owner, Ogando has a different perspective. When working with larger clients, he’s found that sometimes putting media at the forefront of Bakery’s product innovation strategy can pose a challenge to the creative process.
Bakery’s clients include Shiner and Caribbean airline AraJet, which it serves as creative AOR.
By launching KEN, Ogando and Lochridge are designing a different way to collaborate, where creative leads the way–especially in the product innovation space–before media provides guidance later on.
The agency has been successful so far, experiencing double-digit year-over-year revenue growth. Its product innovation speciality serves clients including Nike and Diageo—and it created new shoes and spirits with the brands.
“For us, it is absolutely about the idea, absolutely about the product or the service we’re launching—and media needs to be the ship we put that in and sail it across the ocean,” Ogando said.
Lochridge will ensure that despite this, Bakery’s product and campaign ideas benefit from KEN’s knowledge of ideas, concepts and targeting capabilities.
“We have similar cultures, we have the same goals and we’re working on the same accounts. There’s a lot of collaboration that can happen when you have that environment,” she said.