Headquarters: Minneapolis
Founded: 1992
Revenues: Undisclosed
Employees: 150
Ticker: Private
Web site: www.oco.com
What it does: Advertising, branding, marketing, graphic design



John Olson has thrived on confusion. The dot-com bust and 9/11 whacked the advertising and marketing industries hard, but Olson’s agency, then called Olson & Company, actually added clients and grew revenues during the downturn. And its growth hasn’t stopped since, even as a great many other advertising and marketing firms struggle to find their footing in a fragmented media market.

Olson’s “secret”? “We’ve been able to adapt to a changing landscape,” he says. In short, the firm doesn’t think of itself solely as an ad agency. “We’ve grown in ‘nonadvertising’ ways,” Olson observes. “We’ve grown in interactive and digital, new media, guerrilla and viral [marketing], and design, as well as what people would call PR.”

Olson founded his agency on the notion that we live in a “new-media era,” where content and advertisers’ messages—not only on the Internet but also television—are falling more and more under the consumer’s control. Think of the commercial-deleting TiVo, for instance. “That kind of empowerment of people is really scary to the media, and it’s really scary to brands,” Olson says. “And it’s super-scary to ad agencies.” His agency’s approach is in its slogan, “building bonfire brands,” which means promoting products that consumers can “gather around” in a kind of community. 

“The question we ask at the start of a project is not, ‘How are we going to get people to create a message that everybody is going to laugh at or cry at?’ or whatever. It’s, ‘How do we engage this person? How do we find the connection that makes this person care enough to respond, to do something themselves, to create their own media, to put it into their blog, to send us family pictures that we’ll post on the site so that they’ll feel like they are part of it?’”

A case in point is the work that Olson has done for a longtime client, the Detroit Pistons basketball team. “That’s sort of the ultimate engagement story,” he says. “How do we turn a bunch of detractors [i.e., people critical of the team, of which there once were many] into somebody that feels like they have ownership?” While traditional TV commercials have been a part of that strategy, Olson also has developed Web sites and blogs to build up the fan “community,” and its campaigns have encouraged fans to believe that their cheering is essential to the team’s success.

While early clients such as the Pistons and Phillips Distilling are still with Olson, the agency also has added the Fortune 500 likes of UnitedHealth Group, General Mills, and Target to its portfolio. In 2005, it shortened its name to a simpler, crisper brand, Olson. But, Olson says, “I think we still have the culture we did when we had seven people or so.” Even in confusing times, Olson and his agency are still having fun.