Many great San Francisco ad agencies are actually spinoffs founded by former employees who worked in the hallowed halls of Goodby Silverstein and learned to hone their craft. One time I asked a client how they found Division of Labor and he said, “I Googled ‘ad agencies founded by Goodby Silverstein and Partners employees’ ”. I thought that was pretty smart. When you can’t hire the best, hire the people who learned from the best. Given the longevity of Goodby Silverstein and Partners’ and the talent that’s gone through the place over the years, a good number of us have started agencies. Some ..read more

In the world of climbing, Royal Robbins is a legend. He was the first to climb Half Dome. The first to climb El Capitan. The first staunch free-climbing advocate who refused to use pitons, bolts, and other rock-damaging hardware. And his clean climbing ethics are still used today. Not to mention, his name was “Royal”. It gets no cooler than that. The company he and his wife Liz started was conceived on top of Half Dome and born in Basecamp in Yosemite Valley in 1968. The clothes they made were for people like them. People who lived in basecamps all over the world so they could climb, hike, tre ..read more

Right now in the city of San Francisco, there are more kids who need foster homes than foster families willing to take them in. So foster kids get shipped out of town, away from their friends and schools and the lives they know. It’s a brutal situation for the kids and the parents and the communities trying to solve the problem. To help recruit more people to become foster parents, we started working with the San Francisco Human Services Association back in 2019. Since then we’ve raised awareness of the problem, helped recruit more foster parents and helped keep foster kids in San Francisco. A ..read more

Division of Labor launches a new Ad Campaign for Statsig If Karl Malden was driving the Streets of San Francisco today, he’d be seeing a whole lot of outdoor advertising for Statsig. (If you don’t know The Streets of San Francisco, click here for the best mid-70’s TV show intro ever.)  Statsig builds software that helps product developers, well, develop products. Startups to Fortune 500s rely on Statsig feature flags, experimentation, and analytics to help them, test and launch new products and new product features faster and more reliably than ever before. Another one of our Series B s ..read more

Stytch’s founders and their internal team worked closely with Division of Labor Advertising to create their hugely successful first advertising campaign. The people who work at ad agencies are generally not Rhodes Scholars, rocket scientists, or Mensa members. They didn’t graduate from Stanford, Penn, or MIT. And if you’re the CEO of a Series B startup, you may be smarter than many of them. But intelligence doesn’t make great advertising. Insight does. And ad people know how to connect emotionally with people and make them want things. Yes, it’s sometimes hard for really smart people to relin ..read more

Nothing good comes from buying your own media. We work with a lot of Series B startups at Division of Labor. Often, we buy the media for the campaigns we create. And we get a fee for the service. Often we work with outside media companies and they get a fee for the service. But occasionally, clients choose to buy media themselves. Maybe to save some money. Maybe because they think it’s easy. And nearly every time, they regret it.  So if you’re thinking of just having someone in your company reach out to sales reps, media companies, outdoor companies and digital networks to get some place ..read more

When a startup gets Series B funding is when it can finally focus a bit more of its efforts and dollars on marketing and advertising. According to Crunch Base, the Series B funding stage, “. . . is typically the point in a startup’s lifecycle when it has proven technology or market traction and is on the cusp of major scaling.” And that goes along with exactly what we’ve seen the past five years or so. Looking back at all the companies we’ve worked with, the calls coincide directly with when Series B funding has come in. “The Series B funding stage is typically the point in a startup’s lifecyc ..read more

The Dead Pile. Once ideas are killed, they stay dead forever. Usually. Every creative at every advertising agency has a dead pile; their collection of ideas killed along the way by various clients in the pursuit of that one campaign that would, ultimately, get bought. The dead pile is no longer behind the door, but instead stored in the cloud or copied onto a hard drive, just in case you have to make a break for it.   The thing is, on the way to the dead pool, every idea sits in purgatory for a period of time because the client (we’ll call them God just to keep the metaphor going) t ..read more

Understanding our client’s product is rule number one at Division of Labor. To that end, we moved the agency to Dropbox when we started working with the cloud storage company. We bought Roku’s for every TV when they were our client. And we went electric for our EV clients, Drive Clean Bay Area and VELOZ.  And now that we’re working with Bogle Vineyards, it’s our job, our responsibility, actually, to sample every wine the vineyard produces. And, yes, it’s a tough job. But, we have a dedicated team that’s always willing to go that extra mile. That means blocking off time on our Google calen ..read more

To view more campaign executions click HERE. As 2021 was winding down, our small, but mighty San Francisco-based ad agency got a call from a startup company called Hirect. They were already the number two hiring app in India. Annie Zhang, the co-founder, and her partner founded the app in her dorm room in 2018 and now have over a million-and-a-half registered users.  We hadn’t heard of them because they hadn’t launched in America yet. Hence the call. Given our experience and Bay Area location, our ad agency gets a fair number of calls from startups. But this one was different. First ..read more