By Michael Bürgi • August 30, 2024 •
Ivy Liu
Mindful of the impact of social virality, but by no means demure in its aggressive embrace of it — see what I did there? — Stagwell agency Gale has quietly built out a 50 person team to lead clients into the turbulent but potent waters of culture-riding across the social spectrum.
Gale, which has historically been known for CRM specialization, data-crunching and use of channels others have forgotten about (email, for example) to find business opportunities for its clients, assembled this new immersive social culture unit to leverage all social elements in rapid turnaround fashion to launch clients’ new brands or expand them into new markets, explained Brad Simms, Gale’s president and CEO.
Simms brainstormed with several team leaders at Gale, asking them to consider how they would launch a new brand today. The answer was clear: “No one’s thinking TV, no one’s thinking out of home,” said Simms. “Everyone’s thinking social first. And that doesn’t necessarily mean social platforms all the time, but it means finding a community, understanding what’s going on in that community, tapping into it, [and] have them create content.”
Simms asked two team members to lead the new unit in vp of marketing strategy: Colleen Saporito and vp of PR and influencer Erin Lyden. They were charged with fleshing out the team with two types of skillsets — brand-side community manager/social strategists, and copy writers steeped in journalist-like training to turn around content quickly.
“What we believe was, if you work at a brand, you have a elevated competency around tracking community insights and executing against them, as opposed to an agency where I’m managing across dozens” of brands, he said, “You see more brands that are reacting [to modern trends] in a day or two days, as opposed to two weeks, or, frankly, two months. So we tried to find modern creatives that had the ability to work almost on a journalist’s deadline, as opposed to a traditional creative brief deadline.”
Although neither Simms nor Saporito or Lyden would name the client, Gale applied the rapid-response social immersion team to a popular North America alcohol brand that’s looking to establish a better foothold in other markets worldwide. An upstart automotive brand is also using the team — but it’s too early to know the results for either client just yet.
Saporito and Lyden have assembled geo-specific pods that make up the 50-person team, and each handles multiple clients — an efficiency that helps make them more profitable internally.
The alcohol brand Simms referred to “is really trying to cement its global footprint and be relevant from a global perspective, in different markets throughout the world,” said Saporito, a seven year veteran at Gale. “That’s a perfect example of us needing to have boots on the ground, if you will, to be able to service that model of being tapped into local culture, but then also being able to tell a global story. And those closely geo-located teams are able to work together really quickly.”
Given the incredibly wide swath of social activity globally, the team is also making use of Alchemy.AI, Gale’s multi-functional generative AI platform it launched earlier this year. Alchemy helps to speed up and widen the search for “sensing culture,” as Simms put it. “The fact that Alchemy gave us 30 prompts [daily], of which seven or eight were really interesting allows us to enable creativity, not replace it. It’s going to do a lot of legwork that humans would have taken weeks to do.”
When it comes to measuring success, Lyden said Alchemy helps by reading all comments on any social post of relevance to clients using the team. “As we think about social first, it’s beyond just social platforms, said Lyden who’s been at Gale for three years. “ It’s how people are talking about the brand and the word of mouth and the share of voice. And though it’s not a direct science in terms of cultural resonance, that really is kind of what we’re looking for.”
Although Simms stressed that Gale will still do any and all digital and traditional work its clients need — which he said generated 230% growth in three years — he believes this unit will spur the next wave of growth for the agency. “We are seeing the same demand for a new approach to social-first marketing as we were when we entered the media space and a bunch of new business opportunities,” said Simms. “We expect social-first to support the next wave of growth for Gale and the size of the team to double.”
Jay Pattisall, vp and senior agency analyst at Forrester, said he sees the broader Stagwell offering at play in what Gale is doing — and it doesn’t hurt that Simms is a member of the Brand Performance Group’s leadership team (the Group includes Assembly, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Vitro, Goodstuff and others).
“Gale’s social offering is a distinct combination of capabilities typically found in PR, media and creative agencies,” said Pattisall. “Their heritage as a CRM and loyalty provider gives them a data advantage to connect social, influencer, earned and content to drive more of a holistic brand experience … Data meets creative meets media. It’s a brave new world.”
How very Brat of Gale.
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