"We treat everyone like family," offers creative director Jack Thorwegen. "It's like a big family here," exults Mitch Meyers, COO. "There's a familial kind of thing happening here," allows EVP Norty Cohen. "I'm kind of like the long-lost uncle who's shown up and joined the family again," suggests newly-appointed president Jim Holbrook.

Such family solidarity might raise eyebrows over an agency calling itself Zipatoni, until one notices the lack of appropriately stereotypical surnames among the principals. As it turns out, the name Zipatoni is yet another act of entrepreneurial mischief engineered by founding partner Jack Thorwegen.

"Jack's into the Italian thing," explains Norty Cohen. And, like the rest of the relatives at Zipatoni, he's into the "fun" thing that has become the Zipatoni signature, perhaps most vividly telegraphed by offices that would make Pee-Wee Herman do his mystery dance.

The agency makes its hearth and home in this big open environment. Most of its employees work and play in the center of an elevated floor, bordered by a chain-linked fence. No barbed wire. But there's a mezzanine area on which anyone can perch and see what's making Zipatoni percolate that day.

Then there's this huge, Lewis Carroll-type grinning globe, about fifteen feet in diameter, smiling eternally upon the populace below. Huge, oddly-shaped offices erupt out of the main floor. One is a round tunnel that juts straight up. Another takes a crazed, geometric shape. All of this feels very much like the Zipatoni spirit. What, exactly, is that? You need to hear about it from Jack, Mitch, Norty and Jim. It's one of those whole-is-greater-than-the-parts type of scenarios.

J A C K   T H O R W E G E N - C R E A T I V E   D I R E C T O R

When Jack Thorwegen imagined The Zipatoni Company eleven years ago, his vision was firmly rooted. "My main thought was to make it like the first place I worked," he recalls.

"I wanted an agency where everybody played as hard as they worked. The creatives and the account teams got along. Everybody would be equally respected. We'd have as much fun in business as you can have legitimately.

"I wanted Zipatoni to be the kind of a place where the creativity of the work came first. Assuming that you kept that creative level high, the financial reward would follow. That was my main goal."

Mission accomplished? Given the agency's solid growth rate, it's hard to argue otherwise. Even more important, the agency has developed a reputation not only for high-energy and wildly imaginative creative work but the ability to provide clients with comprehensive strategic programming -- from product development through marketing planning and program execution.-

The challenge now is to maintain and nourish the famous and fun family environment as the agency grows up. Moving forward, Thorwegen's brand of paternal support sometimes sounds vaguely like "tough love," albeit with a decidedly soft touch.

I wouldn't mind having a small restaurant that had a twenty item menu, where maybe three of the items were junk food and the rest was great food.

Everybody at Zipatoni gets as much rope as they want to either be as good as they think they are or really hang themselves. We've had our share of people who come in here very cocky and who think they're extremely good at what they do. When they're finally confronted with an opportunity to put that to the test, some people thrive on it and others get really scared.

You know, I tend to be almost gun shy when I talk about the company. I'm not sure why that is. I feel a lot better when I hear other people describe it. I enjoy their interpretations of what it is. Somebody once said that someone had to die here for someone to get a job. I like that.

One of my favorite campaigns in recent years was the introduction of Red Dog beer by The Miller Brewing Company. Red Dog started off as a product in Canada for Molson, for which Miller has the American distribution rights. When they brought it down to America they changed it from a red beer to a lager and developed the icon.

Miller decided to roll Red Dog out nationally rather than regionally, which at least for Miller Brewing Company was pretty unusual. So we were thrown together with their Red Dog promotion and brand people.

Everything happened within a very short amount of time, within five weeks at the absolute most. We conceived, designed and produced everything for the program.

It was in the Spring, so the promotion was going to be something called "Dog Days of Summer," which obviously tied in pretty well with Red Dog. We made the assumption that it was such a strong icon that consumers would love anything with the logo on it.

We picked the top fifty markets, and in each market we had a radio station give away wearables, a Harley motorcycle or a Jeep Wrangler. The amount of stuff depended on the size of the market and the size of the media buy in that market.

What was exciting about it was that we had one national campaign that had regional executions that suited each of those local markets. In a place like Southern California, for example, they might only get one Harley, but they'd also get ten surfboards and 15 little windjammers or something.

etting the Harleys and the Jeeps turned out to be an amazing process in itself. There's a two year waiting list for Harleys. So we literally had one guy doing nothing but calling Harley dealers all across the country locating them and flying out there, getting them, packing them up, and shipping them to St. Louis. We re-painted them, putting the Red Dog logos on. We did the same thing with the Jeeps.

It was very fun work, very rewarding. It brought the whole agency together. And it was very successful. In Sam's stores they ended up building a 1,00 case display around an actual Jeep, which is really unheard of for a Sam's store and a new brand. We think it was really due to the strength of the Red Dog icon and the attitude of the program, which hit our bullseye target.

Milton Glazer I admire just because he can design anything.

My heroes in the business, by far, are George Lois and Jerry Della Femina. I also admire Milton Glazier as a designer and Helmut Krone as an art director. Helmut was just plain brilliant. He was the art director at Doyle Dane for years. He just passed away. Every five years he would go into a hospital and totally get checked out and when he came home his entire apartment would be totally redone, his entire wardrobe totally changed. He did one of these massive transformations.

George Lois and Jerry Della Femina are common, street-people kind of folks who just have an inherent knack and understanding of marketing. It really shows in their work. Most of it tends to be gut-applied instincts. Most people don't allow that to happen anymore today.
Most of my work, my better work, tends to be just gut-applied instincts.

M I T C H   M E Y E R S - C E O

Mitch Meyers says most of Zipatoni's really good ideas are in a dumpster somewhere. "People just don't have the courage to implement them," she says.

"I mean, look at what Spuds McKenzie did for the Bud Light brand." Meyers is making her case with gusto. "The brand was practically down the tube, going the way A-B's other light brands had gone. One good idea catapulted that brand to a critical mass. And the continuous stoking of the flames helped it grow.

"But it's that pivotal -- the question is, do you buy this idea that could easily have gone in the trash can?" For Meyers, the inquiry is not rhetorical. She's the one who pulled Spuds out of the marketing doghouse and made the puppy hunt for brand Bud Light.

And it's precisely that spirited determination -- mixed with a heavy dose of business savvy -- that Jack Thorwegen knew he needed when he asked Meyers to join Zipatoni back in 1989.

When I was approached by Jack about joining Zipatoni, I thought, "oh gosh, I can't do that." I was having a very successful career at Anheuser-Busch and was too busy to think about it.

But the more I evaluated what I liked about Zipatoni, it was that it is a very creative shop. They had serious needs for business discipline and that's really what Jack wanted me for -- to be the "suit" and understand what clients wanted, to make the agency more strategic. Marry that with his creative expertise and it really worked well.

After I came to Zipatoni, one of the reasons I was successful was that I had been a client. I had sat in their chair, wrote marketing plans and knew how to roll out brands. We're going through a situation with a client right now where they're introducing a new ad campaign in two weeks and we're basically writing the promotion plan to do that for them because we've had that experience.

Everybody cares about everybody else, is very supportive of everybody else. I've been here almost since the beginning, when there were only ten people, and we've gone through growing pains. Every time the agency reaches a new plateau in terms of size, it feels like we outgrow some people.

Pretty early on we learned that it's not good for either party -- either the company or the person we've outgrown -- to keep hanging on. We have literally cut people loose whom we loved and wanted to do well, but they couldn't do any more here. When we cut them loose they go somewhere else and do great. There would be a whole other set of skills that they would learn. One of the things I love about this agency is that the disciplines here are so varied and we have a lot of depth of knowledge.

The one thing we did I'm so proud of -- from start to finish, soup to nuts -- was the whole West End Beverages thing. Basically there were two guys at Anheuser Busch who had been consulting in the New Age beverage category, who approached me and said they wanted to create their own beverage, distribute and market it.

They had no clue what to call it, what the bottle should look like, what the packaging should be. So they asked us to be their partners and figure the whole thing out.

We were basically given carte blanche to create the name, the package and help develop the liquid with the technical product guy and then develop a roll out plan. We met with all the venture capital people because we were one of their partners in the venture, and just learned a whole bunch more. I had new product development expertise, but the entire agency treated this like "our child."

We did everything, including research to determine which of the package designs we had and the names we had were going to be the most salable to consumer. We had our own favorites and opinions, but when you're relying on the market to buy your product, you have to listen to consumers.

N O R T Y   C O H E N - E X E C U T I V E   V I C E   P R E S I D E N T

Norty Cohen thinks promotion has become "old hat" to a lot of people. "Just following everything by rote, just doing things the way they've been done before, produces extremely bland work that doesn't cut it anymore," he contends.

The reason, Cohen says, is that competition is just too fierce. "Consumers see and hear promotions almost as much as advertising. "There's no uniqueness to it anymore. It's got to be something that's really got some breakthrough thinking to it if people are going to notice it."

Cohen believes the Zipatoni edge is what it is because they've honed it for so many years. "Jack was the art director, Mitch was the client and I was the writer. So we've got this natural, symbiotic thing that happens when we work together."

Zipatoni's culture transcends Jack, Mitch and me. When the three of us first got together in 1990, there were maybe 15-20 people here. As we've grown we've added better people.

We've worked toward improving ourselves all along, as well as improving our clients and the quality of the work we're doing. We've had this growth aspect in mind. Now it's taken a life of its own in terms of the culture.

We've always had this element of freedom here and now it's sort of taken this road where we set up a few things where people do things on their own and now they just do it. We're concentrating on running the business and the people here make sure it stays culturally intact.

Because of that, there's a familial kind of thing happening here. Zipatoni's just a nice place to hang out. Our people know that we're concerned first about them and then about the business. We don't step over them to take care of business. That can hurt us in certain cases. But it also helps us because we don't have to spend a lot of time recruiting.

We are truly committed to finding the right solutions. We're not interested in just selling something. We really feel that we want to be part of the marketing team and not a vendor.
One of my favorite programs was one we did for Valvoline. They have about 450 quick lube locations. They were doing a culture/operations change at the end of 1994 and it was a huge deal. They instituted a program where they were going to provide manufacturers recommendations in all of their of their quick lube centers.

What that meant was that the average worker in a quick lube center wouldn't be saying, "by the way m'am, I think you should be changing your PVC value." He'd be saying, "I've just looked up the recommendations on your '93 Acura and they call for a PVC change now. Would you like me to do that?"
So it made a huge difference in the quality of perception in terms of the consumer. It was a big change. They asked us to theme it and then sell it into their system.

We named it "MVP" or Maximum Vehicle Performance. There was a plastic card that consumers could keep in their cars, so when they went to the quick lube center all they had to do was present the card and it had all their past history of service at any of the 450 locations nationwide. It also involved a whole system of direct marketing, where consumers received follow-up information on a regular basis.

It was a very interesting program, but to sell it through, we enlisted the help of Joe Theisman. We needed a celebrity for a video, someone who would motivate the crews who worked at the lube centers. A male sports figure really paid it off.

We took Joe to the convention where the 450 managers were being introduced to the program. Our client went through all the data, the recommendations and the research. But there were a couple of naysayers in the audience who didn't want to change.

Joe was waiting to come on, but couldn't because we had all of these naysayers taking their time to stand up and say that they just didn't want to change. Joe's hearing all of this from behind the curtain. Finally, we just go ahead and play a video about Joe and then the local high school band marches in, beating drums and crashing cymbals and blowing horns. The place starts rockin'.

J I M   H O L B R O O K - P R E S I D E N T

Jim Holbrook is an avid fly fisherman who says entomology is his secret to success. "If you understand what the fish eat you can catch them," he explains. "You need to study bugs to be a good fisherman."

He laughs at the notion that there's a similarity between catching fish and, well, catching retailers and their shoppers.

On New Year's Day 1997, Jim Holbrook concluded a 12-year tour with Ralston Purina to join The Zipatoni Company as president, succeeding Mitch Meyers, who became Chief Operating Officer.
Meyers is particularly excited about Holbrook's arrival. "Jim brings a whole wealth of client-side knowledge, and also the sales knowledge," she says. "He has Px experience and sales exposure at Ralston Purina. He's put the sales together with the marketing. Making that work well is important for every client that we'll call on."

At Ralston, Holbrook assumed a variety of increasingly important roles, ultimately helping the Pet Products Division improve its sales and marketing relationship with its biggest retail customers.

Why would Holbrook leave a skyrocketing corporate career for a roller coaster ride with an agency?

I made the decision to leave the corporate environment for Zipatoni because demand for good ideas and growth is rapidly increasing. Companies have gone through cost-cutting and downsizing, and have been left with efficient, but not creative or innovative operations.

Consequently, the need for bright, intelligent, creative, discipline is only going to grow. The gains from cost-cutting have all been realized. This is especially true in the packaged goods category. The way to battle for market share is through outstanding marketing.

There is no hierarchy at Zipatoni. The agency looks for really good clients that want fun, creative work. Zipatoni is not as worried about making money or running a sweatshop. They want a good culture inside and then build bridges to a certain number of like-minded clients. We don't try to be all things to all people.

Right now, Zipatoni is running pretty much at capacity with its current arms and legs. I'm going to try to boost that capacity. Actually, I don't have a narrow job description. My job is to show, up, pitch in, work with the clients and the creatives. I'm going to look at potential new offerings we might want to put forward and help find talented people to bring into the agency.

I told everyone at Zipatoni, I was going to corporatize them with a stringent dress code and thick manual of policies and procedures (laughs). I think they're going to have more influence on me than I'll have on them.