When Division of Labor first set out to become a top, independent ad agency in San Francisco, the industry was enduring massive changes. Digital was coming into its own, social was taking over and the old model was crumbling. Things were bad, though admittedly, not Covid-19 bad, and we were looking for ways to stand out and get some attention. Because, well, if you can’t find ways to promote yourself, how do you convince a client you can promote them?
So we created a series of posters to serve as our HR manual. They said things like, “Nothing Good Comes From Hitting Reply All” and “If It’s Really Funny, It’s Probably Harassment.”
We hung them on our walls and in our store-front window and gifted them to well-positioned industry insiders. Soon our campaign was featured in trade pubs like Ad Age, but also consumer media darlings including, Fast Company, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and Dwell. And, from there, Division of Labor’s New Rules of Work went viral. Posters were selling like toilet paper in a pandemic via a partnership with Fab.com We even negotiated a publishing deal with Chronicle Books and parlayed our posters into “Stop Tweeting Boring Shit” - the New Rules of work. It was a fun collection of tidbits documenting a new time in the world of work—a social media first, digital workplace filled with entitled millennials and visionary, AKA asshole, tech leaders. We even achieved our life long goal of having a novelty book on that table at Urban Outfitters. It was sandwiched between Everybody Poops and the Onion’s Our Dumb Century.
There was truth in the series, which is the key to any good marketing campaign. As a digital marketing firm, it’s our job to find what’s true and reveal it in an interesting way. And that’s exactly what we did. The workplace had changed dramatically post-economic crash of 2008. But work, if you had a job, was still a place you went.
That Was Then. This Is Now
Today there are new, New Rules of Work. And, yes, in the beginning, we were shell shocked just like the rest of you. But then we did what ad people do: We picked our selves up, dusted ourselves off, and plotted a way forward. And, of course, that starts with a whole new playbook.
So we sat down and wrote it—from home, in sweats, unshowered, just like everybody else in the world. We tried to capture what people are feeling and sharing globally. And to do that, we collaborated with designers across the globe as we collectively do our part to “Stay the Fuck Home.”
We tapped Rigved Sathe, a designer quarantined in Maharashtra, India, to create colorful, motion graphics. Anton Darri Pálmarsson, designed in black and white kinetic type while self-isolating in Reykjavik, Iceland. We even worked with our old friend, Paul Hirsch, a Division of Labor founding partner and current creative officer at Doremus. Hirsch revisited his classic letterpress style of the original series.
We’ll be posting them one a day until we run out of ideas or until the rules change again. That would be nice, but we’re not holding our breath.
In the meantime: “Keep Smiling Under Your Mask.”
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The Small Agency Blog is produced by Division of Labor; a top San Francisco ad agency and digital marketing firm that’s been named Small Agency of the Year twice by Ad Age. The award-winning creative shop services clients on a retainer or project basis. They also offer brand consulting services and hourly engagements for startups and smaller brands. Click here for a free consultation.