Why 2018 Was Such a Banner Year for Essence, Adweek's Breakthrough Media Agency of the Year

It takes a special kind of agency, one year after its founding, to win business for a mega tech company like Google and retain that partnership for 13 years. It takes that same kind of agency to then branch out from its largest and longest-standing client—while still maintaining a strong alliance as its current global digital agency of record—double in size and win 23 additional clients, including BP, British Telecom, men's skin-care brand Bulldog, Coty, Eurosport, Flipkart, Peloton and T-Mobile, in just one year. And that’s exactly what Essence, a data- and measurement-driven agency that is part of WPP's GroupM, did in 2018, making it Adweek’s Breakthrough Media Agency of the Year. [kickout id="4" label="target"] The start of something big Essence's turning point can be traced back to a fateful conversation that occurred about a year after it was acquired by WPP in 2015. Global CEO Christian Juhl says he and co-founder and chief product officer Andrew Shebbeare had a “rather casual meeting” with a few GroupM and WPP executives—including Martin Sorrell, who relinquished his 33-year reign over the company last April—to discuss the future not only for their agency but for the media landscape overall. "We wanted to reduce risk in the enterprise, get more access to quality data around performance, streamline workflows and create a platform for efficiency which, particularly as we think about 2019, is manifesting through machine learning and automation," says Shebbeare. "Although these trends are quite new, the basic idea is quite old. If we get good data, consistent platforms and workflows, we'll be able to create an efficient agency." WPP ultimately agreed with their vision. In 2017, having merged MEC and Maxus to form Wavemaker, the holding company increased its investment in the agency. “From there, we really started to sow the seeds of what this could look like,” Juhl says. While Essence declined to specify the amount of the investment, a spokeswoman noted it allowed the agency to open 11 new offices—including in Salt Lake City, Melbourne and Jakarta, for a total of 18 worldwide—and pick up new accounts from Maxus like NBCUniversal and Target. Last year, the agency didn’t lose a single client and grew its workforce by 40 percent, from about 715 employees to 1,650 (500 of whom were poached from Maxus). [kickout id="2" label="the chain"] Essence also figured out how to scale what it calls its part agency, consultancy and platform service model it built for Google to all its clients. “We’ve had pure-play digital clients outside of Google for a long time, but it was really in 2018 when we became able to win substantial global and U.S. clients that compare in terms of stature, which I think makes the agency much richer and helps create a more diverse point of view,” says Shebbeare. “It also helps us invest more significantly in some of the products we’re trying to build.” Tech capabilities and performance Backed by a 120-person tech team, Essence was able to apply machine learning to its core services last year. It made AI enhancements to its proprietary campaign planning and tracking platform, Olive, which now outperforms human media-buying decisions by 40 percent while lowering costs by 35 percent, according to the agency. And Essence developed what it calls “self-driving campaign technology" to reduce the time it takes to get campaigns to market from weeks to minutes, allowing employees to focus their time on strategy, creativity and professional development initiatives. These capabilities helped Essence create the “Love Your Way” campaign for Google’s Pixel 2 smartphone last year, a mobile-first Valentine’s Day effort that highlighted the diverse ways people celebrate love (including with selfies) and lifted brand sentiment by more than 60 percent. “Essence has a passion for invention,” says Joshua Spanier, senior marketing director for Google global media. He notes that in its early days, Essence built data systems for Google, used code to solve its problems and even helped launch the Chrome browser. “They’ve got computer engineers, coders and teams that will ask the question, ‘How can we build this?’ rather than waiting for someone else to do it first. We have benefited greatly from this,” he adds. Last February, Essence also helped make the USA Network’s Unsolved true-crime series premiere on Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur its most successful debut in seven years. Through integrations with Vice and iHeart Radio’s popular hip-hop shows The Breakfast Club and Big Boy’s Neighborhood, and a USA Network party that featured performances by Busta Rhymes and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Essence drummed up enough awareness for more than 1.6 million households to tune into the premiere. [kickout id="3"] Still, notes Essence North America CEO Steve Williams, formerly the CEO of Maxus, “We’re not for every client.” “We’re fundamentally a data-analytics agency that does media and creative," he says, "and I think that is a really competitive proposition for the clients we have come in.” A culture of respect “Essence had a very curated culture from the early days,” says Essence global chief talent officer Jennifer Remling—a culture that endures despite the recent rapid growth. "It lives here in a way that I've never seen at an agency." At Essence, recruiters are embedded in department teams, "so they intimately understand what kind of talent will do well," she adds. "We're really focused on investing in talent," notes Kyoko Matsushita, CEO of Essence's Asia-Pacific region, the agency's fastest-growing region for the last four years. APAC spans more than 20 markets, and Matsushita says "centralizing" certain functions across the offices there gives the agency an advantage. "The beauty of the digital age is you don't actually have to have the people physically in each market to deliver what we need to deliver," she says. [kickout id="1" label="kyoko"] Essence maintained an 80 percent employee retention rate in 2018 while significantly growing its workforce with the onboarding of 500 Maxus employees and 800 new hires. The agency also placed 50 new people into senior leadership roles, including Brandon Geary, evp of global strategy; Jon Gittings, evp of strategy, North America; Sarah Lent, svp of business development, N.A.; and Amari Pocock, svp and head of media planning, N.A. The agency also made a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion, driving initiatives such as its pledge to achieve complete gender parity, especially at the C-suite level, by 2025; agreeing to go public with its global gender pay-gap report (which is currently underway); hiring consulting firm Mercer to conduct a pay-equality study across its departments; rolling out mandatory training on unconscious bias to all its employees; and launching Ascend, a collaborative program to foster the careers of men, women and gender-nonbinary employees. "This was the kind of company I thought we should build: one that is respectful, additive, transparent, client-first, treated its own employees with respect and thought about the whole advertising ecosystem, not just itself," Shebbeare says. "What's amazing is that my vision of that certainly never extended to Jakarta and Tokyo. … To be able to travel to those places, walk into an Essence office for the first time and see this amazing resonance with the mission and values but also the way that they've taken it and made it their own—it's one of my proudest things about Essence." [kickout id="5"] Key Wins 23 total wins, including T-Mobile ($100 million-$200 million), Airtel ($10 million-$20 million), BP, British Telecom ($20 million-$50 million), Britannia, Flipkart, Peloton, Eurosport and Leica. Losses None. Strategic Moves Brandon Geary hired as evp of global strategy from Possible; Jon Gittings added as evp of North America strategy from MediaCom; Sarah Lent tapped as svp of business development from R/GA; Amari Pocock, formerly of VM1, signed as svp, head of media planning for North America; Adam Gerber elevated to global president of media; creative agency veteran Josh Mandel hired as svp of client solutions for NBCUniversal account. Revenue $350 million, up 25 percent, according to industry estimates. Check out our full coverage: How Global Media Agency of the Year OMD Clawed Its Way Back to the Top After Falling So Far Inside U.S. Media Agency of the Year Initiative's Remarkable 2018 Turnaround What Does It Take to Be One of Adweek’s Media Agencies of the Year?