Launching into our future one rocket at a time.
In the final quarter of each year, Monica Smith, CEO and founder of Marketsmith (MSI), comes to me with a similar question. She asks, “What do you think the future of advertising will look like? Where does Marketsmith fit in that story? How do we compete with the 88,000+ agencies across the nation?” Each year, we debate, research, and question our journey together. But 2022 was different. With the impending economic slowdown, a shift in the agency landscape, and a larger divide between the holding companies, privately owned shops, and CMOs looking for more flexibility than ever before, we saw an opportunity to reinvent ourselves, restate who we are, and revisit our future plans. Ultimately, this morphed into what we are now calling “unleashed”. To us as an agency, unleashed embodies freedom, bravery, triumphs, and challenge. It is a word we are now using as a verb, empowering all employees, regardless of level or tenure, to unleash themselves, their ideas, and their passions.
Join me as I recount this journey and share with you our official unleashed philosophy, a reimagined agency for the times we find ourselves in today.
Launching MSI, the agency. Passion. Purpose. Performance.
We take campaigns from inception to launch, and from possible to significant.
Transforming data to knowledge, we forge a bold path, using tools that bring our clients’ historical knowledge and today’s insights to life.
Our success is based in creating new frontiers that give way to great brand triumphs.
Mission Accomplished.
On February 9, the Marketsmith team got together in our first hybrid event of the year to unleash our organizational vision of the future. It is embedded deeply in our beliefs that building strong relationships and full-scale collaboration on all fronts is the key to success and companywide engagement. And that’s exactly what we did — we shared new ideas, goals, and even built some paper rockets!
Team Building
The day started with an icebreaker appropriately named “Paper Rockets,” where the objective was to stump your colleagues by writing a unique or absurd fact about yourself on a colored sheet of paper. Teams were sorted by color and launched their rockets to their respective launchpads. As facts were read aloud to the organization, including our virtual attendees, laughter filled the room, and prizes were given to those who could not be stumped! Some of the facts people included ranged from having a street named after them in Michigan to once being a clown in a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Throughout the event, we held a series of icebreakers and team-building exercises that would not only encourage cross-departmental collaboration, but also create meaningful connections that would give employees a safe space in which to unleash themselves and their abilities as we scale and grow together. Upon arriving at the venue, all team members received a card that prompted them to enlighten everyone with what “being unleashed” meant to them.
During the course of the day, we reminded everyone to keep an open mind, listen to their colleagues, and let their freak flags fly when deepening their unleashed thoughts throughout the course of the day. After participating in several activities and panel discussions, as well as hearing from our colleagues, we revisited the premise of unleashed, but this time as a team. Led by our Battleship One leadership team, we broke into small groups to discuss how the idea of being unleashed has changed throughout the program and how each individual could have an enormous impact on the organization by unleashing him or herself. Teams collaborated to come up with one, or a few, concise definitions of what unleashed meant, and how they could embody that culture every day as we look forward.
Panel 1: Unleashing Our Virtual Culture
The first panel featured four employees who joined the Marketsmith team amidst our transition to our work-from-anywhere model. One of our goals heading into 2023 is to continue modernizing and optimizing our hybrid work model, with a majority of employees continuing to work from home. All of the panelists shared tips as to how they maintain a good work-life balance as the remote workplace remains prevalent in our modern world. Some suggestions included taking a few minutes to exercise and step away from the computer during lunch time, or creating a separate workspace away from the places in your home when you spend time with your family and relax. This can help to create healthy boundaries and improve your focus while working from home.
Panel 2: Unleashing Organization Change-makers
The second panel featured four employees who have been especially impactful in advancing our work environment. Each of the individuals on this panel took initiative on a project that shifted the way our company functioned in a positive way. Whether it was integrating a completely new project management platform, or developing new software to improve functionality and productivity, these changemakers were fearless in the work they tackled to better Marketsmith. This panel was so important because each of the panelists truly embody the spirit of unleashed, and demonstrate why it’s so important to take risks and be confident to be successful.
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