Tom Fugleberg, recently the executive creative director for Minneapolis-based Olson, just moved into the newly created position of “chief brand officer.” What does that job mean at a fast-growth firm that positions itself as a “post-advertising agency”?
Olson says its purpose is “to build and activate communities” for brands. The firm has been a pioneer in producing integrative campaigns. It landed last year on Advertising Age’s national list of top 10 agencies to watch, and lately has been on a small acquisitions spree, growing to 400 employees. Fugleberg has been there since 1997, when “we were just a handful of people.”
He says his new job is to build a community around the Olson brand—“make sure we’re coming from the same heart, the same mind”— across disciplines, across merged companies, across offices in Minneapolis, Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. “My greatest charge right now,” Fugleberg says, is to have the company “as we grow bigger, feel and act smaller.”
That’s internal stuff. Building the community outside the company takes a different kind of mental shift, to hear Fugleberg describe it. A business that’s been working at growth can become “known for growth and for acquisitions,” rather than for its creative capacity.
Maybe that’s especially true if the firm’s post-advertising nature is still a bit of a mystery to some. “Our brand, we have this wonderful enigmatic quality to us, kind of this Area 51—‘Man, they’re growing, but what in the heck are they doing?’—and we want to maintain the best parts of that,” Fugleberg says. “But I think the brand itself can act with a little more ingenuity . . . putting a flag in the ground that says ‘This is a very creative company.’”
