A purpose-driven agency that instead of having to focus on shareholder value, can leverage its profits and resources to support people and organizations that can’t afford professional marketing services.
It’s Summer 2012. I recently turned 26 – the age we unofficially pretended I was when we founded HOME in 2010 – a digital full-service agency and a joint venture between 3 rookies and one of Austrian advertising’s biggest players. It was my third year in this business and the peak of what was a crazy ride going from Junior Art Director at the great DRAFTFCB agency to the manager of a small business with 15 employees.
While business didn’t look promising that summer, on the surface we seemed to have great success. We were serving brands like MERKUR, Interwetten, Casinos Austria, Garmin and Redbull Mobile. We had a fantastic office in the city center.
The team did some great work and had a great time but the office culture was adolescent and toxic.
It missed something very important.
A purpose. A shared vision on top of sound financial business planning and senior leadership.
For me personally, it also was the first time in 3 lightning-fast years that I had the chance to reflect on myself. I knew I loved the profession. Branding, marketing, storytelling, graphic design, entertainment, content. These things have always excited me. I was surrounded by a lot of talent, creativity and was lucky enough to meet some great friends. But the industry… I don’t know.
I worked a crazy amount of hours. The pressure and anxiety. The low pay for young talent while the managing directors drove expensive sports cars and bought champagne in Cannes. I saw an ugly pitch culture, narcissism, and excessive self-congratulation through countless awards. I witnessed chauvinist and outright sexist behavior.
What I never saw though, in any agency, was a purpose.
Something bigger than the awards and pitches won. Something more important than incremental revenue.
Finding one’s purpose
I started thinking of my 16-year-old self. The one with big dreams and naive ambitions. Sure he’d be proud and he’d love his outlook of the future. And there was mom. Serving as a role model, working in healthcare, waking up early every day, taking her bike through sickness and tiredness to take care of her patients. Never letting anyone down apart from maybe herself.
All those memories made me realize I was missing something the young Mario had – strong beliefs and values as well as awareness for social and environmental causes. So I had a decision to make. Do something else… or try to do it my way. I started to get excited. What would a perfect agency look like?
Back then, I never heard about “purpose” or “social entrepreneurship” but I thought I would give myself some time to develop this further.
The universe wasn’t as patient.
Scrambling through the early days
Starting from the bittersweet day of my exit at HOME – old clients, partners, and employees began contacting me. One thing led to another and I found myself having 3 months to go into business, build a core team, find an office and incorporate. I scratched together all my savings and said, well, let’s treat this as an experiment.
I had a wonderful partner and future wife in Denise who supported me in private and business and not much to lose (apart from the investment). Given that I had so little time to develop a brand, I went back to the dream I had. I don’t remember how it manifested itself but the whole Robin Hood thing was somehow burned into my brain.
Robin des Bois.
I simply ignored the fact that no one could pronounce it and we established the acronym RDB in most of our communication. The story became somewhat of an easter egg, waiting for people to be uncovered. I loved how it sounded in French, an homage to my French father and the culture that highly influenced me.
It also adds that pinch of internationality and for me, French always was about human rights & revolution. Something very much in alignment with Robin Hood’s value system.
The old Disney Robin Hood movie remains one of my all-time favorites. To me, that film is the epiphany of romantic knighthood and brotherhood. Still, it serves as a North Star I build my “brand worlds” around. My recent holding company is named “The Major Oak”, after the real Oak Tree Robin Hood is claimed to have lived in.
The storytelling opportunities were endless and his values omnipresent. Everybody would know what we stand for when they hear Robin Hood. It also has something outlaw to it. Someone who challenged the oppressive system. I felt business in general needed more of that.
A brand is born but never finished
I phoned my dad. I asked him to draw up some sketches and we got to work. The result was a very suboptimal first logo.
As soon as our great graphic designer Philipp Zach got on board, he cleaned it up and built a great first corporate design around it. We took the bold move to go all-in on the Robin Hood theme, hired a parkour champion to run through the woods and one of my favorite photographers STETER Studio to stage the best shoot we ever had. Every employee got their own Robin Hood character and costume. We had a blast and the resulting portraits are still hanging in the office, reminding us of our beginnings.
In the summer of 2014, we got Renée Reust onboard to help us develop the brand further. For the first time, we had an end to end brand identity but we started to struggle with the restrictions of the Robin Hood theme. This created the difficult challenge of trying to maintain a balance and not come across as cheesy.
RDB is going through puberty
In the meantime, our vision and mission were evolving, as was our business. The culture of our employees with 18 different nationalities started shaping us. The global scale of our clients started changing our perspectives and opened our horizons. We realized how important it was to have a clear positioning. To develop a clear mission statement, a clear purpose. Robin Hood was no longer enough to represent what the agency has become. And that is when we started to make all the mistakes you can make.
- We thought we could handle it in-house, whenever there are resources available.
- We thought no one could know us as well as we do.
- We started redesigning without a strong and new positioning.
- We knew we wanted to go somewhere else but did not know where to.
The result: Countless hours. Frustrated art directors. A deluded brand identity. Lost momentum.
We knew, if we want to finally accomplish this, we need some help. We need to handle this as we would handle it for our clients, with an outside perspective and a strong methodology. We got some looks when we decided to outsource our branding to a different agency. Not only from our in-house creatives, but also from some of the agencies we asked for a proposal. But we were lucky.
One of the three candidates we wanted to work with was Christian Cervantes and his wife Miriam, with her being a brilliant strategist and him a tremendously talented creative director who worked at Mother in New York and London. Was it Vienna where it would all come together?