Brains Agency in Review 2024

The Us, by Us Year

Dear reader, welcome to our yearly agency review. As is tradition, this is our moment to look back at how our collection of brains navigated being an agency and doing creative work together in the world. It’s our yearly reckoning of how we tried, failed, or succeeded at living up to our highest ideals and values.

This marks my sixth year writing these reviews as co-president of Brains. What started as an internal exercise to document our learnings has grown into something more — a gesture of transparency and accountability that we share openly.

This year’s reflection hits different. Less dramatic pivots, less existential crises keeping us up at night, fewer “unprecedented times” demanding yet another unprecedented response. Instead, a simpler story about what happens when the dust settles a bit — and we figure some shit out.

As always, I love talking shop and hearing others’ experiences — you can reach me at ben@brains.co.

Now, let me tell you about 2024…

New Brands, Same Brains

We started out 2024 launching our new look. And it fit us much better. It was us, by us. And that felt good.

We had also ended 2023 by reworking our values. It was us, by us. And that felt good too.

Those things mattered. We started the year with a fresh haircut and bright eyes — after a pretty challenging year (please see Global Financial Crisis for more information).

I won’t lie, some of this year’s post may even read as boring (I’m going to talk a lot about processes). But we just experienced a year where boring was cool. Real cool. No existential crises. No global pandemics. No economic meltdowns. Last year I wrote that “change is the only constant,” and that holds true. We changed a lot. But this year we changed more on our own terms. Change by us, for us. And that felt good.

Annnnd it worked. We had record years across both Brains and Mass Culture. And the two agencies worked together just like we dreamt it up.

We were the same Brains as ever, a quirky can-do agency with big hearts and creative minds… but we had a new bite to us this year. We hit a stride, and we were very very good at our jobs.

The amount of objectively good and business impacting work we did this year was truly incredible for me to witness. I’m so proud of our team, and so proud of how we helped our partners this year.

A lot of things hit right for us this last year, but I would credit a lot of our success to the fierce focus on processes that we embarked on at the beginning of 2024.

“Ben, are you really about to write 2000 words about processes?” you ask. Well… yes, yes I am, thank you for asking. And buckle up, because this process post has bangers.

See, here’s the thing about creativity that nobody likes to talk about: its best friend just might be boring ol’ process. I am an undying romantic about the chaos of creation — the inexplicable late-night breakthrough, the shower epiphany, the stroke of genius pulled from a hat. But 2024 was our year of embracing a less sexy truth; that good processes and structures yield incredible creative outputs, at scale — but only with a bought-in group of individuals.

Simple insights. Clear strategy. Impactful creative. And bought-in individuals living out values that are us, by us. Maybe it’s all as simple as that?

The Impact Agency

We started last year with a clear focus; I wanted to be an ‘Impact Agency’. Yes, yes I am aware that sounds cringy… like saying we’re the ‘Anti-Agency Agency’. It smells of ‘Le Bullshit’.

The truth is I think the agency world is in flux. Many of the big agencies are struggling. The landscape is changing and we are finding more and more clients looking for an agency relationship that is more aligned and incentivized towards a full business view.

Less about awards. More about impact.

That’s us. We’ve pivoted our agency over the last six years to meet the changing landscape and build a team that gets the business side as much as the creative side.

“What are we trying to do?”

It’s amazing how important that simple question is, but how often overlooked it is in the agency world.

This year we were an Impact Agency. And it turns out, it has a lot to do with that unsexy foundation-building and process setting.

Here’s what we learned: real impact — the kind that transforms businesses and moves needles — doesn’t come from random strokes of creative genius. It comes from having a precise understanding of what moves those needles, and a values-aligned team ready to move them. It’s about having systems that can turn insight into action, and processes that can scale success without sacrificing soul.

It comes from a fierce look at processes and setting your team up to be able to cook.

Simple insights. Clear strategy. Impactful creative.

And we have proof! This year we launched new brands into the world that are thriving (and helped build new ones that are about to launch). We saw our D2C partners have record-breaking results. And our non-profit partners have the same. We helped partners like Nex and Magna-Tiles expand and build their brand into new retail channels and crush Q4. We helped 100 year old family companies like Just Born impact their culture. And we partnered with tonies for our fourth year together to incredible new heights (I believe tonies will be one of the most important brands of the next decade).

Each partner had common threads in our shared success. We had GREAT partner relationships this year. We positioned ourselves towards impact. And that led to aligned and shared goals. And that led to great relationships. Yes, I believe we had truly inspiring creative this year, but we also did the unglamorous work of building measurement frameworks that could precisely target and scale what was working and why. Launching Mass Culture wasn’t just about adding media buying to our toolkit — it was about creating a seamless system where creative and media could work together like a well-choreographed (Renaissance Tour Beyoncé) dance.

That’s what being an impact agency really means. It’s about having the systems in place to not just create great work, but to know exactly how that work is affecting our partners’ businesses. It’s about being able to trace a direct line from our creative choices to real business outcomes.

That’s kind of sexy?

Stuff We Did

If you’ve read any of our previous year-in-reviews, you know we talk a lot about our grand experiment: Can we build one of the best agencies on the planet while keeping our people happy and healthy? Six years into this “experiment” and we’re still experimenting (with slightly fewer lab accidents).

This year our leadership team started with some questions: How do we maintain a people-first culture while building the processes needed to scale? How do we add structure and deliver impact without becoming a soulless burnout machine? Can we have our cake and eat it too? Can we be the most creative AND the most impactful?

These questions led us to that fierce look at processes.

We started by defining what excellence actually looks like. Not in vague terms, but in specific, actionable qualities we could observe and nurture. We identified five key traits our highest performers embody: pivoting with purpose, pursuing brave ideas with bold action, speaking fluent client, and perhaps most importantly, working out loud and enjoying the ride. These aren’t just nice words on a wall — they’re the standards we now coach toward and celebrate.

But excellence isn’t just about individual performance — it’s about creating systems that let everyone thrive. We completely reworked our resourcing processes to give us a full, real-time look at everyone’s workloads. We built systems and standards for how to create the most space for the best creative work. And we stopped calling it resourcing. Seeing each other as resources is dangerous. It’s now a weekly workflow exercise that includes the entire leadership team. It’s the best way to know what, who and how we are doing as an agency. It’s the dedicated practice of taking care of one another and of our partners.

We implemented Pulse Checks to monitor team burn out, stress, and satisfaction. We launched No Meeting Fridays to protect deep work time. When new business opportunities started flooding in, we built the ability to scale our capacity without sacrificing quality. It’s not the kind of thing that wins awards, but it’s exactly the kind of foundation that lets us consistently deliver award-winning work.

We got a lot of data and we used that data.

Here’s a detail from our data that perfectly captures why I love our team: When we analyzed our Pulse Check results, we discovered something fascinating. Our Project Managers and Account Leads were consistently reporting high stress levels — but not for the reasons we expected. These leaders weren’t stressed about their own workloads or challenges. Instead, they were carrying worry for their team members, even in cases where those very team members were reporting that they were doing just fine. Think about that for a second: we had team members losing sleep because they thought their teams were overwhelmed, while those teams were actually reporting as thriving. Our Accounts team has an empathy meter dialed to 11. What a wonderful problem to have.

But that data collecting was the only way we were able to identify that and then help fix it with new language and new systems.

We also tried some things that didn’t quite work. Our first attempt at goal-setting was ambitious — maybe too ambitious. We created a cascade of goals that flowed from company-wide objectives down to department goals and finally to individual goals. We had so many teams and goals that our goals had goals. It was goal Inception.

So by the end of the year we pulled back. We simplified. We focused on fewer, more meaningful metrics. And something interesting happened — the more we simplified our goals, the more our teams actually achieved them.

But the real magic happened when we started treating our process development like a creative project. Instead of just implementing systems, we asked our teams to help design them. The result? Processes that actually work for the humans using them, not just the spreadsheets tracking them.

Processes by us, for us. And that not only felt good… that worked.

A New Chapter in Leadership (And a Heartfelt Goodbye)

So much of our success this year can be tied to our incredible leadership team.

And none more than the three that are joining me as new partners in Brains as of Jan 1st, 2025.

But before I talk about our new partners, I need to take a moment to acknowledge a pivotal transition. After years of being the steady hand that helped guide our financial ship, my co-president and partner Brandy Amidon is stepping away from Brains and deeper into her role at Mass Culture and as mayor of her thriving town, Travelers Rest. Brandy will share more about her transition elsewhere, but if you’ve read our previous reviews, you know how instrumental Brandy has been in building the foundation we stand on today. Her leadership helped us navigate through COVID, through economic uncertainty, and through our own evolution as an agency.

I remember when Brandy and I first stepped into our co-president roles. We were young leaders with big dreams and probably just enough naïveté to think we could actually achieve them. Looking back now, I realize that naïveté might have been our superpower. Because here we are, having built something good, something real, something that’s ready for its next chapter.

And what a chapter it’s going to be.

I’m thrilled to announce that Gustavo Delgado, Moe Rice, and Drue Flynn are stepping into partnership roles at Brains. Each brings something unique and essential to our leadership team. If you’re wondering what makes them the right fit for this next chapter, well… let me tell you about them.

Gustavo has this uncanny ability to see patterns where others see chaos. He can look at a complex business challenge and not just solve it, but turn it into an opportunity for growth. I’ve watched him transform how we approach client partnerships, bringing a level of strategic thinking that has fundamentally changed how we deliver our standards of impact. He has been instrumental in shaping our definition of excellence and pushing us towards where we are as an agency today. He is also one of the only people on planet earth that can hurt my feelings. A true gift held for the select few and the select talented.

Moe is our cultural compass. She is our heart and the keeper of the magic of Brains. She has this extraordinary talent for understanding both the art and science of what we do. She’s helped us maintain our soul while building our systems, reminding us that process without purpose is bankrupt. Moe can name a new company in her sleep and arrives at brilliant creative solutions faster than anyone I know because of her equally and delightfully weird // empathic brain. She is best known for making grown men cry during creative pitches and for going to renaissance fairs.

And Drue? Drue is our design GOAT. Jordan in her prime, she makes the impossible look effortless and has never met a design challenge she couldn’t crack. Her work isn’t just beautiful — it’s transformative. I’ve watched her turn complex brand challenges into elegant solutions that seem obvious in hindsight, which is perhaps the highest praise you can give a designer. She embodies that rare combination of creative prowess and strategic thinking that defines where we’re heading as an agency. Drue will be tasked with building one of the world’s best branding studios within our walls. Drue and I share a deep love for Martin Short and old movies with questionable themes.

These new partners, along with the rest of the leadership team kicked a lotta ass this year. And did much of the work to set us up to have the year we had.

Us by us. That feels good.

A Final Note

Every year when I write these reviews, I try to find the thread that ties it all together. The story beneath the story. And this year, I kept coming back to one question.

I turned 40 this year, and did plenty of reflection — as is my right and duty as a married with two kids multi-agency owner (next up I get to get into historical biographies!).

I even went on a retreat this year with a friend and one of our partners (as is my right and duty). And this was the question I brought to the retreat:

Can you scale something and not lose the soul of something?

Honestly, I don’t know. Look around. It’s not super encouraging. The ideas often feel mutually exclusive. … And that sucks.

At the end of the year, I brought this question back to the leadership team..And to the new partners. And honestly, f*ck it. We want to give it a swing.

We keep finding year after year that often just asking the question bends the arc in the right direction.

Is it possible? Yeah, we think so.

Will it be perfect. Absolutely not, no. Not even close.

But we’ll keep trying to ask the right // hard questions.

And the experiment continues.

This year revealed that maybe the real test of any experiment isn’t in the dramatic moments. It’s not in the crisis responses or the breakthrough innovations. It’s not even in defining those qualities of excellence we’re so proud of. No, the real test comes in the quiet moments, in the daily practice, in the steady building of something sustainable. It’s in the moments when no one’s watching and you still choose to hold each other accountable to our highest ideals.

Looking ahead to 2025, I’m filled with this profound sense of possibility. Not just because we’ve built strong foundations or because we have an incredible team of partners and creatives. But because for the first time, I can see how all the pieces fit together. How the processes we’ve built and the culture we’ve nurtured aren’t just supporting our work — they’re amplifying it. We’re no longer just an anti-agency agency, or an impact agency, or whatever we decide to call ourselves next week. We’re simply Brains, and we’re building something that matters. Something that works. To put it simply, 2025 will be a year where Brains f*cking cooks.

…

Each day at Brains I see incredible things. I see our team rallying around each other during tough weeks, at our designers collaborating on ambitious projects, at our strategists diving deep into thorny problems. I see how our new systems — from Pulse Checks to Workflows — aren’t just making us more efficient; they’re somehow also making us more human. That’s rad.

Can you scale something and not lose the soul of something?

We’ll see.