Here’s to the Mutts.

We’re a few weeks into this experiment we’re calling Plein Air. Here’s where things sit.

We were incredibly lucky to launch with a partner that gave us space to grow. The work of new business, like anything else of importance, takes time and pressure. There’s no magic potion. Be scrappy, go beyond what established companies are willing to do and make sure you hit every project out of the park. A month or so in, the work is starting to pay off. That is good stuff.

We’ve been actively pursuing partnerships that we believe will be mutually beneficial. We have 3 such partnerships so far, and we believe all will be fruitful in all sorts of ways. More on that later.

We just finished up our Year Zero Annual Report. We’ll do this every year so we can be clear about what we’re doing. This will become public soon.

The positioning of Plein Air has probably been the hardest part. It’s difficult when you’re not simply selling the same thing that everyone else sells. We know that the cost to advertise is increasing and we know the attention you get for those dollars is decreasing. It would be easier to repackage advertising solutions, but working out how brands can grow if no one pays attention to advertising is a far more interesting challenge.

That means we don’t fit squarely into any one category. We’re mutts. The solutions we offer may manifest themselves in all sorts of ways. It could be a partnership, an app, updates to packaging, store experience enhancements, a loyalty program, content, events, a new product. Then there’s the measurement of all of that, both the basics of objective-setting and tracking that everyone should do and the modern deep data analysis that should be used to measure all marketing efforts today.

That makes things muddy when most clients define their relationships by the output of their agencies. There’s digital or social or media or whatever. It’s a big box of hammers looking for nails. We aren’t one of those hammers.

The word simplify rings through my head, but that tends to pull us towards positioning ourselves along those same well worn paths.

The companies I admire most are great because of the diversity of their talent. Think of the task of creating Amazon’s ecosystem of products — ecommerce, advertising, hardware and software development, hosting infrastructure, delivery and premium content. All of these pieces work together and one often makes the other better. If you were to describe what Amazon does today, it’s incredibly complex, and that complexity makes them better. Compare that to most industrial age companies that exist across a series of siloed operations. Can you imagine a US financial organization capable of creating something like an Amazon today?

The most innovative companies on the planet have become so because they’ve been able to combine strategy, engineering, design and other skills that many businesses have trouble bringing together.

If I want our company to follow in the footsteps of those I respect most, then the challenge is not to only find simplicity, but to breathe inventiveness, creativity, risk, ambition and a healthy disrespect for the merits of any one potential solution. That takes diversity of skills, often combined in non-obvious ways.

That means for our story, we’re following one of the oldest rules of advertising, if you want to sell a shovel, sell the hole. Very few companies have a problem with their shovels. There is not a shortage of advertising, digital, social, whatever agencies out there.

Yet the hole still exists. People under 40 especially are turning off advertising, literally and figuratively. To solve this, companies should be turning the entirety of their customer experience into a customer-focused and connected engine for growth. 89% of companies agree that customer experience is the battlefield for competition, but there is a massive gap between what customers want and what those same companies are offering.

We are a modern creative agency building customer experiences that are more connected, useful and shareable. This next frontier will require t-shaped companies full off t-shaped people, mutts like us, applying creativity to real customer problems. That’s what we do.